Abstract
Telerehabilitation is defined as delivery of rehabilitation services over telecommunication networks and the internet, which comprise of clinical assessment (the patients functional abilities in his or her environment) and clinical therapy. This new area of medical advancement, using state of the art technology is developing at a great speed and is definitely going to be the next milestone in health care revolution. The objective of this study was to explore the awareness, knowledge and perception of the patients for using telerehabilitation as a medium to provide physiotherapy services as a part of home healthcare services. A pretest-post test design was used where the home healthcare patients (n = 90) aged between 50-75 years were asked to express views by given a validated modified TUQ questionnaire followed by an in depth interviewing to develop a key understanding regarding the themes. Interviews were transcribed and a qualitative thematic analysis was conducted. The awareness level regarding the telerehabilitation changed significantly from 57% to 96% post session(p<0.05). Similarly, the knowledge of the participants regarding online consultation, followup and online therapy changed significantly from 50%, 47% and 57% to 96%, 76% and 96% respectively post session of rehabilitation(p<0.05). The perception level regarding the key benefits including its usage in emergency(83%), convenience of no travel(84%), ease of getting treated at home(97%) and availability of specialist consultation (84%) were the prime ideas for excellent rating among 95% participants (p<0.05) post session. Findings are helpful to health practitioners in designing their intervention programsacross the kingdom. However the actual impact could be only derived from future studies which has to conducted based on different clinical conditions.