Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed people’s lives and the way in which certain services are provided. Such changes are not uncommon in healthcare services and they will have to adapt to the new situation by increasing the number of services remotely offered. Limited mobility has resulted in interruption of treatments that traditionally have been administered through face-to-face modalities, especially those related to cognitive impairments. In this telerehabilitation approach, both the patient and the specialist physician enter a virtual reality (VR) environment where they can interact in real time through avatars. A spaced retrieval (SR) task is implemented in the system to analyze cognitive performance. An experimental group (n = 20) performed the SR task in telerehabilitation mode, whereas a control group (n = 20) performed the SR task through a traditional face-to-face mode. The obtained results showed that it is possible to carry out cognitive rehabilitation processes through a telerehabilitation modality in conjunction with VR. The cost-effectiveness of the system will also contribute to making healthcare systems more efficient, overcoming both geographical and temporal limitations.
Highlights
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), telemedicine is the provision of health services through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for the exchange of information between the health professional and the patient
The system was used by 20 healthy patients and a neuropsychologist who conducted the cognitive rehabilitation procedure
virtual reality (VR)-based interventions have been especially numerous in the cognitive rehabilitation of Alzheimer’s patients, providing satisfactory results, the long-term effects are not yet fully known [57,59,60]. These sessions are usually administered face-to-face and the use of telerehabilitation is relatively new for the treatment of this disease [49]
Summary
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), telemedicine is the provision of health services through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for the exchange of information between the health professional and the patient. The use of telemedicine should not replace the provision of conventional health services, but rather seeks to integrate them, making them more efficient and accessible to the user. All this should be done without neglecting the principles of confidentiality and professional ethics that should accompany any health practice [7,8]. Several authors have made a comparison of the methodologies applied in telemedicine in contrast with the results obtained in conventional therapies, achieving good performance in the former [10,11]
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