Telelife: An immersive media experience for rehabilitation

Abstract

In recent years, emergence of telerehabilitation systems for home-based therapy has altered healthcare systems. Telerehabilitation enables therapists to observe patients status via Internet, thus a patient does not have to visit rehabilitation facilities for every rehabilitation session. Despite the fact that telerehabilitation provides great opportunities, there are two major issues that affect effectiveness of telerehabilitation: relegation of the patient at home, and loss of direct supervision of the therapist. Since patients have no actual interaction with other persons during the rehabilitation period, they will become isolated and gradually lose their social skills. Moreover, without direct supervision of therapists, rehabilitation exercises can be performed with bad compensation strategies that lead to a poor quality recovery. To resolve these issues, we propose telelife, a new concept for future rehabilitation systems. The idea is to use media technology to create a totally new immersive media experience for rehabilitation. In telerehabilitation patients locally execute exercises, and therapists remotely monitor patients' status. In telelife patients, however, remotely perform exercises and therapists locally monitor. Thus, not only telelife enables rehabilitation at distance, but also improves the patients' social competences, and provides direct supervision of therapists. In this paper we introduce telelife to enhance telerehabilitation, and investigate technical challenges and possible methods to achieve telelife.