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The challenge of collaborative telerehabilitation: conception and evaluation of a telehealth system enhancement for home‐therapy follow‐up
Author(s) -
Pani Danilo,
Barabino Gianluca,
Dessì Alessia,
Uras Selene,
Raffo Luigi
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.3441
Subject(s) - telerehabilitation , telehealth , multidisciplinary approach , collaborative care , rehabilitation , process (computing) , telemedicine , computer science , collaborative model , multidisciplinary team , process management , health care , medicine , psychology , physical therapy , engineering , nursing , psychotherapist , social science , linguistics , philosophy , sociology , mental health , economics , economic growth , operating system
Summary Telerehabilitation aims to solve problems like equitable access to the rehabilitation and cost reduction by providing rehabilitation services at a distance. The largest part of telerehabilitation systems implement a real‐time one‐to‐one process involving patient and therapist. Even though they can be successfully exploited in conditions such as post‐traumatic recovery, in complex scenarios, this simple model should be replaced by a more structured collaborative one envisioning a multidisciplinary team. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a patient‐centric collaborative telerehabilitation framework aimed at supporting a multidisciplinary team in the follow‐up of domiciliary patients. The proposed framework follows the experience of a clinical trial that exploited a novel telerehabilitation device not conceived to support collaborative scenarios. Compared with the original system, the proposed extension allows the hierarchical division of the responsibility within the medical team, promoting a collaborative management of the rehabilitation. Proactive and decisional behaviors, as well as consulting practices on shared data within the medical team, are fostered by the system. Semi‐structured interviews have been administered to a panel of experts to evaluate the proposed approach. The collected feedback can be exploited to finely tune the system in view of a new clinical trial including new functionalities. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.