Tele-rehabilitation needs assessment: A multi-disciplinary approach

The current paper is aimed at describing our scenario-based approach in the elicitation of the needs of a tele-rehabilitation platform from the perspectives of four clinical centers in different member states of the European Union for four types of pathologies usually affecting the elderly: neurological, orthopeadic, pneumonic disorders and musculoskeletal pain. Retrieving the appropriate needs from users is fundamental to guide the technical work and the ‘real’ implementation and deployment in daily rehabilitation care. The methodology applied to retrieve clinical user needs might also be interested for other parties developing tele-rehabilitation services as well. A multi-method stepwise approach was used to retrieve the functional and system needs. Crucial elements of this approach were a) conventional care as the starting point for envisioning about (future) tele-rehabilitation care and b) the composition of scenarios describing the anticipated use of the tele-rehabilitation platform by a fictive patient. These scenario storylines were used as ‘representations for communication and joint understanding’ between developers and clinicians. By means of the scenario we were able to a) to better understand how a specific team can deliver the (tele-) rehabilitation service to a particular patient group and b) to develop home therapies based on different sets of rehabilitation exercises which are relevant to the concerned pathologies.