Telerehabilitation Laboratory

Delivering in-home telerehabilitation services represents major challenges. The Telerehabilitation Laboratory develops and uses user-friendly, low-cost platforms that provide high quality audiovisual communication between the clinician and the patient in his home. It also offers innovative features due to the integration of an interactive gaming environment combined with remote real-time measuring of biomechanical and physiological parameters. With these remote measures, the clinician receives real-time data on the patient’s physical condition thus allowing him/her to adapt the gaming parameters to suit the patient's needs. This fosters adherence to the exercise program and optimizes the patient's functional gains.

The telerehabilitation laboratory at the CIRRIS was the leading site for a major multicentre clinical trial, the Tel-Age Project (Telerehabilitation following a total knee arthroplasty), a provincial project conducted by CIRRIS researcher, Dr. Helen Moffet, and two co-principal investigators, Dr. Tousignant at the University of Sherbrooke and Dr. Sylvie Nadeau at the University of Montreal.  This project using videoconferencing technology demonstrated that, in 204 people operated for total knee arthroplasty, the remote rehabilitation sessions over the first two months following hospital discharge, was equivalent to the clinical sessions and that the cost was lower than the traditional home follow-up visits. These findings support the implementation of telerehabilitation approaches on a larger scale.
 
The telerehabilitation laboratory is testing a new telerehabilitation platform, the eChez-soi, equipped with integrated measurement tools and a video-game environment that encourages patients to perform the exercises.  These new facilities are currently used in two funded research projects.  Initiatives are underway to identify the needs and the platform’s applicability to various clienteles of the IRDPQ – Institut universitaire de réadaptation. (Quebec Rehabilitation Institute). The current work examines the technical reliability in various contexts (laboratory and in-home) and the validity of the collected data. The perception of the users (patients and stakeholders) is also taken into account to improve the platform and ensure its usefulness in research and clinical settings.
 

 

The eChez-soi platform integrates, through a new software interface, the following three technological features:

 
1- continuous data collection (real time) with commercial biometric sensors (e.g. oximeter, accelerometers) and automatic reading of data collected with other devices (e.g. blood pressure, electronic scale) used by a patient during his/her rehabilitation sessions. These sensors and devices were chosen for their widespread use and proven technology, their portability and their Bluetooth or Wi-Fi communication feature,
 
2- continuous transfer, via Internet, of biometric data collected by the sensors from the user’s computer to the main computer used by the clinician for real-time monitoring of the data,
 
3- a stimulating and flexible gaming environment enabling the patient to perform exercises especially adapted to his/her condition (exercises created by the clinician). The audio-visual communication between the patient and the clinician is supported by the Vidyo Telepresence system. This system was chosen as the videoconferencing web platform because of its ease of installation, safety, quality and stability in a standard network environment.
 

You are invited to contact Dr. Helene Moffet or visit her web page.

CIUSSS-CN Université Laval Alliance santé Québec