Objectives: Telerehabilitation (TR) is an alternative approach for providing rehabilitation services in some situations, like Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. There exist some obstacles, especially during the pre-implementation phase of TR, necessitating an investigation of existing local evidence. This research aimed to investigate the challenges of TR. Methods: Five electronic databases (Scopus, PubMed, Google Scholar, SID, & Magiran) were searched for studies published in English and Persian language from 2011 to February 2021. Search results in all databases provided a total of 598 articles. After reviewing the titles of the articles, we excluded 574 articles as they were duplicated and/or irrelevant. Finally, based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 11 articles have remained. Results: Most extracted articles were published in 2020 (n=4). The remaining articles disturbed between 2013 until 2021. These articles were mostly reviews, case reports/series, or qualitative studies and surveys. Geographically, 27% of the final selected papers belonged to the USA, 46% to Asia, and 27% to Europe. Outcomes in studies mostly included TR advantages and disadvantages, facilitators, challenges, and barriers. Discussion: Studies specified numerous challenges for TR implementation. The main challenges in the technologies used in TR were the awareness and culture of individuals and the TR infrastructure. Despite these barriers, TR could be a better treatment selection in some patients. Therefore, it is necessary for health policymakers, and especially rehabilitation managers, technology developers, scientists, and clinicians to cooperatively make serious efforts to remove these barriers.

Background: Telerehabilitation is an emerging technology that uses digital technologies to perform evaluation, counseling, treatment, and telemonitoring to provide rehabilitative care to patients in various locations such as homes, communities, health centers, and workplaces. This approach has advantages such as reducing costs and overcoming barriers of distance and time. Reducing patient-rehabilitator interaction, and being hard to teamwork and express thoughts and feelings are some disadvantages of this approach. TR services are provided by a variety of rehabilitation specialists. The aim of the study was to identify barriers in the way of implementing TR in Iran Methods: This study was conducted using a conventional content analysis method based on a qualitative approach. 26 people were selected as participants based on purposive sampling with maximum diversity. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and managed using MAXQDA 10 software. Results: 765 codes were extracted by conducting interviews and coding. The findings of this study are classified into seven main categories and 32 sub-categories. The main categories are insufficient infrastructure, legal, physical, and moral hazards, lack of priority and insufficient determination, insufficient support of the public and non-governmental organizations, poor knowledge in using equipment, Lack of knowledge and negative attitude, and low capacity in comparison with face-to-face rehabilitation. Conclusion: This study shows that based on the insights from the experiences of participants, inadequate infrastructure and poor knowledge of the use of equipment are the most important obstacles in the way of TR. This study reveals that the implementation of TR in Iran encounters several obstacles and eliminating them requires serious effort.

No abstract

No abstract