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.