It's Not Just the Movement: Experiential Information Needed for Stroke Telerehabilitation
This addresses the problem of incomplete data in stroke telerehabilitation for specialists, offering incremental improvements by suggesting design changes to incorporate experiential information.
The study investigated what data is essential for stroke telerehabilitation, finding that specialists rely not just on movement data but also on experiential information about survivors' lived experiences to interpret data and create rehabilitation plans. It argues for including non-movement data in telerehabilitation systems.
Telerehabilitation systems for stroke survivors have been predominantly designed to measure and quantify movement in order to guide and encourage rehabilitation regular exercises at home. We set out to study what aspect of the movement data was essential, to better inform sensor design. We investigated face-to-face stroke rehabilitation sessions through a series of interviews and observations involving 16 stroke rehabilitation specialists including physiatrists, physical therapists, and occupational therapists. We found that specialists are not solely interested in movement data, and that experiential information about stroke survivors' lived experience plays an essential role in specialists interpreting movement data and creating a rehabilitation plan. We argue for a reconceptualization in stroke telerehabilitation that is more inclusive of non-movement data, and present design implications to better account for experiential information in telerehabilitation systems.