TELEREHABILITATION IN THE PHYSIOTHERAPY PRACTICE: A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS THROUGH BIBLIOMETRICS

¹Escola Superior de Saúde do Alcoitão / Alcoitão School of Health Sciences, Physiotherapy, Estoril, Portugal

Background: As defined by Kazuko Shem (2022) Telerehabilitation (TR) refers to the delivery of rehabilitation supported via a variety of technologies and encompasses a range of rehabilitation services that include “evaluation, assessment, monitoring, prevention, intervention, supervision, education, consultation, and coaching.” These technologies and services are available to provide care for persons with disabilities who need acute, subacute care, and long-term follow-up. TR is delivered by a broad range of health care professionals, which may include Physiotherapists.

Purpose: The usage of technology, in Physiotherapy practice and education, is still growing, with a possible impact also on research. However, the increase in the number of scientific publications makes it difficult to know the scientific structure and development of a specific field. Visualization techniques based on bibliometric data are useful for the understanding of scientific fields.

Methods: This is a bibliometric, descriptive, and retrospective study. The author identified publications from the Pubmed database from 2000 to 2022 related to the use of TR in physiotherapy practice using this search string ("Physical Therapy Specialty"[Mesh] OR "Physical Therapy Modalities"[Mesh]) AND (Telerehabilitation OR telehealth OR teletherapy). From the titles and abstracts of these publications, was selected the main terms related to the field, extracted by VOSviewer software, to create a visualization of the most important trends referred to in the literature.

Results: The author identify 920 eligible references (300 Clinical trials and Randomized Controlled trials and 61 Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review). Upon analysing the co-occurrence of the Mesh terms associated with TR and Telemedicine, the most common one was the usage of this approach to provide care by using exercise therapy in middle-aged patients with a focus on the quality of life as a major outcome. It was noticeable also the emergence after 2020 of the use of these strategies during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Conclusions: In overall, as shown by the published research, the interest in this topic has grown exponential, influencing all aspects related to the interaction between health professionals (including physiotherapists), patients and communities.

Implications: As the global need for rehabilitation continues to grow, many challenges to accessing it remains unaddressed. Telerehabilitation has the potential to address these challenges by using locally available resources. Despite the growing evidence of telerehabilitation applied to the context of intervention (including several steps of the Physiotherapy Process), integration of this emerging technology into the academic curriculum is still slow because of various interrelated human, organizational and technical challenges.

Funding acknowledgements: No funding was required

Keywords:
Telerehabilitation
Physiotherapy
Bibliometrics

Topics:
Innovative technology: information management, big data and artificial intelligence
Health promotion & wellbeing/healthy ageing/physical activity
COVID-19

Did this work require ethics approval? No

Reason: This study do not require ethics approval, because do not use subject intervention or collects patient data.