RERC on Telerehabilitation Science State of the Science Conference
November 17, 2008

“Telerehabilitation: State of the Art from an Informatics Perspective”

White Paper Authors:

  Bambang Parmanto, PhD is an assistant professor of health information management and biomedical informatics at the University of Pittsburgh.  His research interests are in the areas of mining, visualizing, and managing complex data sets, and in the areas of Internet technologies. He is the principal investigator for a project that develops technologies to mitigate barriers to computer and Internet use by people with disabilities. Parmanto lead the development of project MyHealthBits, funded by Microsoft Research.  The project takes on the challenges of managing and recording every bits of daily information related to our health: from heart beat to X-day to phone conversation and videoconferencing. He is also a co-investigator of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Telerehabilitation.



  Andi Saptono, MS is a doctoral student within the health information management department at the University of Pittsburgh.  He has an extensive software development experience in private sector, especially in internet-based products and e-commerce. He was the primary architect of MyHealthBits, an advanced personal health record system and the primary developer of AcceSS, an internet transcoder for blind people. He also has experience in conducting usability studies on handheld and wireless devices, such as PDAs. Currently, he is affiliated with the RERC on Telerehabilitation, focusing to build an integrated infrastructure to support telerehabilitation.



Expert Panel Members:

  David Brennan, MBE, is a Senior Research Engineer with the Center for Applied Biomechanics and Rehabilitation Research at the National Rehabilitation Hospital, in Washington, DC.  Over the last 9 years, with funding from the National Institute on Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, and the United States Department of Defense, his work has focused primarily on the development of interactive computer-based tools for delivering telerehabilitation interventions.  Mr. Brennan has presented at national and international conferences and meetings, and authored numerous articles on telemedicine applications in speech-language pathology and telemedicine human factors.  He is the outgoing chair of the Special Interest Group on Telerehabilitation of the American Telemedicine Association, where he also sits on the Standards and Guidelines Committee.  


  Sajeesh Kumar, PhD is an Assistant Professor at Department of Health Informatics Management, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. Sajeesh’s research focuses on design and development of telemedicine devices, applied health informatics, rural and remote healthcare service and assessment of medical technology. Sajeesh has won several research awards, published books (Teleradiology, Telesurgery, Teleophthalmology- All published by Springer), book chapters and scientific papers in high impact journals including Lancet.