Barriers and levers for the use of telerehabilitation through experimentation in three countries

Telerehabilitation is defined as the use of ICT to provide rehabilitation services to people remotely in their environment. These services can be of different types, such as assessment, monitoring, intervention, supervision, education and counselling.  Humanity & Inclusion / Handicap International (HI) has integrated the use of ICT in several rehabilitation projects, such as the management and production of 3D orthoses, the PARI project or, more recently, the creation and development of a rehabilitation application (OpenTeleRehab) in Vietnam.

The emergence of a global pandemic related to COVID-19 has encouraged the use of digital tools and the implementation of telerehabilitation in many HI projects to ensure the follow-up of beneficiaries. Telerehabilitation has been done differently in different projects, some have used rehabilitation applications, others only communication tools. Whether planned or implemented after the pandemic, these experiments allowed professionals and beneficiaries to experiment fully or partially with telerehabilitation. These experiences have highlighted the barriers and levers for professionals and beneficiaries in the use of telerehabilitation

The aim of this study is to describe and analyse the barriers and levers for the use of telerehabilitation and the use of rehabilitation applications in HI rehabilitation projects, at beneficiary and practitioner level.

The objectives are:

1. Identify the difficulties and contributions of the use of rehabilitation applications for telerehabilitation in the care of beneficiaries, for professionals.
2. Identify the challenges and benefits of using telerehabilitation for beneficiaries.
3. Identify success factors and failure conditions in the application of these tools in projects.
4. Describe the characteristics of "age, gender, disability" of beneficiaries who have used telerehabilitation services based on available data.

The content of the work may be copied, distributed and transmitted for non-commercial purposes only. The work must be cited as follows: Sonia Cardoso. Barriers and levers for the use of telerehabilitation through experimentation in three countries. Lyon: Humanity & Inclusion, 2021.