Development and implementation of technologies for physical telerehabilitation in Latin America: a systematic review of literature, programs and projects

Telerehabilitation has arised by the inclusion of emerging technologies for capturing, transmitting, analyzing and visualization of movement patterns associated to patients with musculoskeletal disorders. This therapeutic strategy allows to carry out diagnosis process and rehabilitation treatments, remotely. This paper presents a systematic review of the current development and implementation of telerehabilitation technologies in Latin American region. The main goal is to explore from reported scientific literature and divulgative sources whether rehabilitation technologies had achieved to be introduced in this region. Likewise, this work discloses current prototypes or systems that are to being used or that are still under development. A systematic search strategy was carried out by two different searches. The first one involves a rigorous literature search from the most relevant scientific digital repositories and second one includes telerehabilitation projects and programs retrieved by an advanced Google search. A total of 53 documents from six countries (Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina) were found; most of them were focused on academic and research initiatives to develop in-home telerehabilitation technologies for both pediatric and older population, which were affected by motor and functional impairment, cerebral palsy, neurocognitive disorders and stroke. The analysis of reviewed findings revealed the need for a comprehensive, integrated health and social system approach to increase the current availability of telerehabilitation initiatives in Latin American region.