Dear Colleagues,

Physical medicine and rehabilitation have an increasing demand for IT tools that help physicians and physiotherapists to objectively evaluate patients’ improvements. Innovative technologies such as motion capture systems, virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence can be exploited to design medical applications useful to enhance and restore functional ability and quality of life to people with physical impairments or disabilities, including spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, strokes, as well as pain or disability due to muscle, ligament, or nerve damage.

Even if several research works have demonstrated how innovative IT can drastically improve the work of medical staff and patients’ rehabilitation, many research prototypes have never been adopted as rehabilitation tools in daily medical practice. This is usually related to the high costs of some solutions or the high complexity of use for both physicians and patients. The issue of moving a new solution from a research prototype to a useful rehabilitation tool must be considered one of the main challenges for innovating rehabilitation and tele-rehabilitation.

This Special Issue aims to investigate methods and tools to design research prototypes by considering their real introduction into hospitals and patients’ homes to improve rehabilitation processes.

Suggested topics:

• Evaluation of usability: methods and tools to evaluate the usability of innovative rehabilitation tools according to the needs of both medical personnel and patients;
• Tele-rehabilitation: main challenges for moving rehabilitation processes from the hospital to the patient’s home by considering human and technological aspects;
• From ad-hoc developed technologies to consumer IT: economic and technological challenges in designing rehabilitative IT tools based on consumer technologies (e.g., laptops, smartphones, and tablets);
• Design of natural user interfaces of applications for tele-rehabilitation;
• Virtual reality and augmented reality for tele-medicine;
• Motion capture solutions and innovative tools for motor skills rehabilitation;
• Artificial intelligence for tele-rehabilitation.

Dr. Andrea Vitali
Prof. Dr. Daniele Regazzoni
Guest Editors

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• Physical medicine and rehabilitation
• Tele-rehabilitation
• Method and tools for usability
• Motion capture systems
• AR/VR
• Artificial intelligence
• Natural user interface