This Publisher's Report describes the collaboration between a university library system's scholarly communication and publishing office and a federally funded research team, the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Telerehabilitation. This novel interdisciplinary collaboration engages librarians, information technologists, publishing professionals, clinicians, policy experts, an...

BACKGROUND Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is an effective intervention for the management of people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, available resources are often limited, and many patients bear with poor availability of programmes. Sustaining PR benefits and regular exercise over the long term is difficult without any exercise maintenance strategy. In contrast to trad...

South Africa, like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, has a disproportionate burden of disease and a shortage of health professionals. Telemedicine has been identified as a possible way of overcoming part of the problem but telemedicine has not been widely adopted. In the public sector hospitals in South Africa which serve 82% of the population there are 2.5 physiotherapists and 2 occupational the...

Recent advances in telecommunication technologies have boosted the possibility to deliver rehabilitation via the internet (i.e. telerehabilitation). Several studies have shown that telerehabilitation is effective to improve clinical outcomes in disabling conditions. The aim of this review was to determine whether telerehabilitation was more effective than other modes of delivering rehabilitatio...

Introduction: The TELEKAT project (“Telehomecare, chronic patients and the integrated healthcare system”) has developed a telerehabilitation programme enabling patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to perform preventive home monitoring across sectors. The goal of the project is to help patients avoid readmission to hospital, perform self-monitoring and to maintain rehabilit...

OBJECTIVE This study examines how telerehabilitation becomes part of existing and new clinical routines and identifies factors that enable or constrain its routine use. METHODS An in-depth case study of a telemedicine program in rehabilitation implemented between an urban specialized rehabilitation center and a rural regional rehabilitation center was conducted. Using a conceptual framework b...

Current VR telerehabilitation systems use offline remote monitoring from the clinic and patient-therapist videoconferencing. Such "store and forward" and video-based systems cannot implement medical services involving patient therapist direct interaction. Real-time telerehabilitation applications (including remote therapy) can be developed using a shared Virtual Environment (VE) architecture. W...

Telehealth is a broad term used to describe the use of electronic or digital information and communications technologies to support clinical healthcare, patient and professional health related education, and public health and health administration. Telerehabilitation refers to the delivery of rehabilitation and habilitation services via information and communication technologies (ICT), also com...

Despite documented benefits, many Total Joint Replacement (TJR) patients find it difficult to access rehabilitation following discharge from hospital. One solution to improve access for TJR patients is telerehabilitation. This study aimed to assess the feasibility of introducing a telerehabilitation program for TJR patients. TJR patients at QEII Jubilee Hospital were invited to complete a quest...

BACKGROUND The Cochrane review on the effectiveness of speech and language therapy for aphasia following stroke suggests intensity of therapy is a key predictor for outcome. Current aphasia services cannot provide intervention at the intensity observed within trial contexts because of resource limitations. Telerehabilitation could widen access to speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in geographi...