Selzer 2-13.qxd

Imagine the following scenario. Stuck in traffic, you have your digital agent make contact with the secretary at the Rehabilitation Center via your wireless palmtop. You are immediately provided with a verbal listing of your daily schedule. It is clear that you will have a tight timetable, and already anticipate a hectic day filled with clinical rounds, research meetings and an afternoon lecture for third year medical students. You request your digital agent to retrieve last year’s lecture presentation on the rehabilitation of patients with Parkinson’s disease, and to locate abstracts of the latest research on this topic. These files will be waiting for you on your office computer when you arrive at the Rehabilitation Center. Finally traffic starts to move, and you make it to your office. Clinical rounds have been delayed and you use the opportunity to complete your daily exercise routine on your stationary bike which is facing an omnisurround screen.Viewing a virtual mountain path winding through the Swiss Alps, you are inspired to cycle uphill for a full 15 min. Your digital agent calls you just as you warm down to notify you that ward rounds are about to begin. The first patient is a 45-year-old businessman who is at the Center for intensive rehabilitation following knee arthroscopy. The patient is anxious to return home so you ask your intelligent agent to contact the agents of the surgeon, physiotherapist and occupational therapist who are not currently at the Center. All team members gather around an interactive, collaborative workspace to examine the X-rays, digital probe and ultrasound as well as other clinical outcome measures. The decision is to discharge with a course of telerehabilitation; the patient will sign on daily to a remotely supervised exercise program. You then ask the surgeon to demonstrate the procedure he used to the ward resident via a virtual knee arthroscopy simulator. The manipulation is somewhat complex but with some practice the resident gains a good sense of what the procedure entails. Upon your return to your office, you log onto your synchronous distance learning platform to connect up with the third year students who are in their classroom on campus. They can each see your slide presentation on their personal tablets and hear you lecture. They each activate emoticons to indicate their response to your lecture as it unfolds. After reviewing the basic concepts of the disease etiology, prevalence and clinical signs and symptoms, you ask them to each don a cyberglove in order to feel the difference between Parkinsonian rigidity and upper motor neuron spasticity. They next put on a miniature liquid crystal display (LCD) lens while you run through a series of simulations that enable them to evaluate the improvement in Parkinsonian gait experienced by these patients when provided with virtual overground cues. The students use their own microphones to participate in an interactive discussion about the advantages and limitations of these and other recent non-invasive interventions. As you complete the class and prepare for the intake of a new patient you reflect in amazement that not a single student fell asleep! This is a certainly different from the days when you went to medical school.