Event ID: 1167660
Event Started: 11/17/2008 12:48:01 PM ET


Please stand by for realtime captions.

Hi, I wanted to let you know we'll get started in a few moments, right now our audio is muted. We'll be back on in just a couple of minutes.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, from around the world. This is Kate Seelman, welcome to this this state of the science telerehabilitation conference. We're doing it from the research center on telerehabilitation. It's my pleasure to introduce Dave Brienza and Mike McCue.

Thank you. What a great opportunity we have here today and the rest of the week. We have registered for this conference about 250 people from 14 or 15 countries, and from 37 states around the United States. One of the reasons I feel this is a great opportunity for us is together with this very diverse group we can engage in a discussion on the state of the art of telerehabilitation. The professionals and consumers around the world recognize the need for access, available and affordable services. Because of the percentage of the population disabled increases every year. In turn if our society does not adopt changes and appropriate strategies that curb costs, costs are looking to be unsustainable levels. Telerehabilitation provides cost-effective ways for face to face needs. And how we can more integrate consumers.

We will engage you in responding and encaging to the outcomes of the conference and will help to set the future.

I will bring you through an overview of our system here. I would just like to say we do know something about telerehabilitation, however we're not novices when it comes to virtual conferences, this is our first attempt. We're learning as we go through this. Our objectives, we want to present and discuss the state of the art in telerehabilitation. We want to explore current issues in technology, enuser usability [ Interference ]. We want to identify barriers. And identify and prioritize future research and strategies.

We started this process, preparing for this conference over a year ago now. Back at that time we had an internal meeting. We had many discussions about what topics to cover during this conference. After some deliberation decided on a set of four topics we would present and use as the content of the conference this week. We assigned internal staff members to those topics. The center staff developed ideas for white papers on each topic. These authors were directed to solicit additional experts from outside our center to serve as coauthors. These coauthorrers provided initial drafts of the white papers. These were distributed to many of you via email and are now available on the website for our international journal of telerehabilitation.

The initial drafts were reviewed by the panels. And additional changes were made. And they were posted to the website and distributed. Today we have these papers to be presented by the authors. And most importantly, we want to have discussions on these papers and the topics of the papers. This is perhaps the most important part of what we're trying to do, as a community get together and [ Interference ] these papers. The way we'll proceed to do this, we'll have our discussion during the conference today, the conference will proceed by the presentation of the white papers, response from preselected expert pan pannists and an open discussion which all of you will be able to participate in.

After the conference we will have established a blog site in which we can use to continue the discussion online for probably until the end of the year. The information from today and this week and the information from the blog site will be used to revise the white papers and produce a final draft. Final draft will be published in our -- in the premiere issue in April of 2009.

I also would like to tell you this conference telecast will be available for viewer offline within about 24 hours after the conference ends today. We will post the address, and we will send you an email with that information on how to access the archive.

Another important aspect of what we're doing today is offering CEUs and those are available to you, for those of you that are interested in CEUs. In order to receive the CEUs you must complete the post conference evaluation, we will get you more information on that when the time comes.

What I would like to do now is give you a short overview of your screen and the layout that you have in front of you. This will be the layout that we'll be using for the majority of the time here. On the upper left there is a video feed, which you are seeing the three of us right now. I will just jog this so you can see the video window. In the upper right is the pod where you will see slides from the presenters. This will be where the PowerPoints will be presented for today. This is in the upper right corner. We have available to you, um, the documents. Those are the lower right. Just to the left of the far right. These are various support documents that be available to you to download and view on your own computer on our own time. Very important window in the far lower right of the screen, that's the chat window. We would like to you to use the chat window to interact with us and ask questions. The expert panelists who are not at our location will be on a telephone call, that call is bridged into the system that we're using and streamed out to all of you. We don't have any mechanism for you to give us your audio feed, that would be unmanageable. We would like to communicate with you through the chat window. Will be offline moderating throughout the day and responding to your questions, or forwarding the questions to the presenters. In the lower left of the screen is the closed captioning window, which will contain the text of the audio stream.

Okay, that is a tour of the screen. I have a few reminders for you. Continuing education information is there, the website that you will need to go to is on your screen, and I have the conference blog address up there, as well as the conference website.

Just want to make sure I didn't forget anything here. We have technical support, should you need it. There's phone support for those of you in the United States, or those of you wishing to make an international phone call. You can email our technical person at.

I want to remind you that you are part of this conference, stay alert. We have some interactive elements to this. Maybe I will just see if you guys are out there, and ask you to respond to a short poll here. Tell me what country you are from. If you would just go ahead and select your country of origin. We will get a sense as to where you are located.The countries listed in my polling question are the countries that we know people are registered from. We're seeing who is out there. If they're having trouble selecting, just click on the radio button associated with the country. It looks like we have about 38 people, of the 68 people, currently online that are responded. 42, we're getting closer. Is everybody awake? Maybe I'll just add a couple of thank yous. First of all, I would like to thank the funding source of the conference, our center is responsed by part of the Department of The United education. I would also like to thank our center's advisory board. We have a dedicated group of people who show us the way, and give us advice. They've been instrumental in planning this event.

Also here, locally, putting on this conference we've learned quickly is not an easy task. We have a great technical support team here in our school here at the University of Pittsburgh, thank you to you. Some of the most undesirable tasks fall to the students, no exception here. Many of the tasks have fallen to our students in our center, I thank you. I would like to thank the support we've received from Adobe and Dave. Dave has really given us -- taught us how to do this. He's online right now supporting us, thank you for everybody you have done.

As we planned this event and worked towards this day there's no two people that have worked harder than Ashley and [ Indiscernible ]. They've worked on this 40 hours a week for the last month. Every time I talked to them they were working on this. Thank you to Kate and Ashley for that. Ashley is off-camera here. I would also like to thank all of the presenter and panelists. Obviously a key role. We're looking forward to your contributions.

Mostly, all of you out here online getting the stream. You are the reason we're doing this. We would like to have your input and have you participate.

Mike, I think I will leave it at that. And turn it back over to you, so you can introduce today's presenters.

Thank you. Welcome, everyone. I would like to second Dave's appreciate to all involved. I would also like to encourage the audience to give us feedback about the content and also about the mechanism for communicating through this. Any feedback you can provide is of value. I had the privilege of introducing of authors for our first paper today. Telerehabilitation state of the art from an informatic perspective. Here at the University of Pittsburgh we like to talk about the PIT model. It's based on an architecture that was developed through this grant, through the work of the authors of this paper. We want to acknowledge the importance of the basic informatics architecture that goes into the delivery of telerehabilitation programs and services. With that, our white paper authors are Bambang Parmanto, an association professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His Dr.S areHe is a principal investigator for a project that develops technologies to mitigate barriers to computer and internet use. Dr. Parmanto leads my health bits, funded by Microsoft research. This takes on the challenges of managing and records every bit of daily information related to our health. He is a coinvestigator of the research center on telerehabilitation. Andi Saptono is a student within the department of health information management here at the University of Pittsburgh.He was a primary architect of my health bits. And the primary developer for bottom line people. He also has experience in usability studies on hand held devices such as PDAs.

I would also like to thank and introduce our expert panelists for this paper. David Brennan is a senior research associate at the National Rehabilitation Hospital. Over the last nine years with funding with the national institute on biometcal engineering, [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ] his work has focused on the development of interactive computer-based tools for delivering telerehabilitation interventions. Mr. Brennan has presented at international meetings and authored numerous articles. He is the outgoing chair of the special interest group on telerehabilitation of the American telemedicine association where he sits on the standards and the guidelines committee.

Our last panelist is Sajeesh Kumar. His research focuses on the design and development of telemedicine devices, applied health informatics, rural and remote healthcare service.Dr. Q Sajeesh Kumar has won several awards [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ] we have an excellent paper for you today. Please listen and participate with us in this first of four papers. With that we will break for about 60 seconds to get our authors set up and we'll be back very shortly.

Hi, welcome everybody to day one session today. Thank you for a great introduction. With me today on my right-hand side is Andi Saptono, that will be presenting with me for this session. And then on the left-hand side is Dr. Sajeesh Kumar. Joining us from the National Rehabilitation Hospital is Dr. David Brennan. You will see him momentarily. Okay.

Hi.

Yeah.

Instead of covering the entire session with presentation and discussion at the end, would we plan to do is to divide the session today into five minisessions. At the end of every minisession we'll have a short discussion, and also comments from the panel, and also we'll invite participants to provide comments and questions, as well. At the end we'll have discussion for everybody, after the panel discussion.

The goal of the day one today is to provide systematically [ Interference ] especially from the informatics perspective. You have on your screen, on the slide there, those are the items we'll be discussing today.

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We are still testing the audio system.

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Okay. I'm sorry for the -- for the problem. We lost the audio system. Right now it's on. I will repeat. As you can see on the screen, the outline of day one session will be dividing into five minisessions. We try to establish the relationship between [ Indiscernible ] with [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ]. And then the second minisession we'll try to review the state of the art deliveries. We'll be doing with two or three of you from the past decade. We'll try to give examples of services that we have that are state of the art. And the third minisession we will introduce a new model from an informatics perspective. After that we will discuss and review the issues and challenges as a result of new technologies. The last minisession we'll discuss the potentially new technologies, discuss new technologies that can be used to develop new services and the problems associated with it.

We have done this introduction, we will move on. We'll move on to the first minisession. The goal of this first minisession is we will discuss telerehabilitation, why it's important, and the differences between [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ] and telerehabilitation and telemedicine and the similarities. [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ] to otherwise unserved populations in rural and urban areas. That also can be applied to telemedicine. What are the differents? And what will the similarities? The first thing is to review the definition of telerehabilitation put out there. We came up with four good definitions. These come from the tens of [ Indiscernible ] that we have reviewed. These are the four definition that we think are a good representation of the definitions that have been around out there. The first is the delivery of rehab services over telecommunication networks and the internet. It's a good one, a short one. It provides a good component. Especially with the network and the internet. We don't know what rehab services is. A similar definition can be applied. We can change the rehab with medicine or health. The second definition is from the RERC on telerehabilitation, which is our center. The remote delivery of rehablecation and home indicate care services. There's something new here, the home health care services.

The third is from AOTA position paper. It's the clinical application of consultive, preventive, diagnostickic and therapeutic services via two-way interactive telecommunication technology. It includes consultive, diagnostic and therapeutic.

The last is from a paper by R.

C Ricker etr. There's something interesting here. The focus on a person with disabilities, and subcomponent of telemedicine. We will discuss about it. And then it's also the new type of services of assessment.

From this definition we'll try to list characteristic of telerehabilitation. The first one is range of services that includes consultive, preventive, diagnostic, assessment, support, intervention and therapy. Also we saw telerehabilitation has a great interest in home healthcare and individual with disabilities. What is missing is what are rehab services. We take into what makes up rehab services. What we learned is rehab services, a main characterric includes enabling individuals with disability and restoration of individuals.

We came up with the long definition. This one is not elegant. Long definition is very lengthy and very tiring, perhaps. I think this capture more precisely what telerehabilitation is. It's the application of telecommunication network, and the internet to deliver consultive, preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic services to enable individuals with disabilities and to restore individuals physical and psych social functions.

We would like to invite your input. Before I forget, I would like to mention that the white paper that we have put out there is still a rough draft. What we plan to do is to based on the discussion today, we'll revise the state of the art paper and put it out there and revise it again and publish it. Please provide your comments and feedback.

Once we define telerehabilitation the next thing we would like to do is to discuss what type of services, what are the examples of telerehabilitation? What are the services that provide it under telerehabilitation? To do that there's an excellent paper from Jack Winters from 2002, we will use it as a starting point for the discussion today. This paper is an excellent one, it's old by now, it's been six years. Informatics six years is quite a long time. What we want to do throughout the discussion today, especially in the third minisession we will expand the model to make it more flexible and to frame the telerehabilitation, to be able to capture the latest technology, as well. The first thing, this model first tried to list the services that are provided under telerehabilitation. And then this model also tried to establish the relationship between telerehabilitation and telemedicine as well as e-health. Those are the four type of service delivery. They're listed there on your screens for you.

This is a good diagram that tries to establish the relationship between telehealth, telemedicine, telehealthcare, and e-health. There's an intersection between telemedicine and telerehabilitation, but not all telerehabilitation therapies are under telemedicine. There are surfaces that resembles [ Indiscernible ], especially the [ Indiscernible ] one. This one is -- this model, and also by observing what is out there the main characteristics we tried to come up with the main character of telerehabilitation, especially from the informatics perspective. The differences between telemedicine and telerehabilitation, the first one is what we observe from the intensity of the information exchanged between the two sides. Either from clinics to home or clinics to clinics. Telemedicine has a very intensive session. While telerehabilitation the information exchange is less intensive. We're talking about the majority of telerehabilitation services.

Then the second difference that we observe is that telemedicine usually has a long-term, a continuous encounter. Sessions are briefThe encounter is over a longer period of time. Those are the two differences. What we will use these two main characteristics as the basis for the fourth quarter model that we will discuss in the third minisession.

The last point for this minisession is why telerehabilitation is important? The first one is because of the technology push. The technology is available, or will be available. Because of that it will allow us to develop new rehab services that otherwise cannot be done using previous technology. Among the technologies worth mentioning is the broad band connection, it's available in most homes in the United States. Also the availability of high speed technology to provide mobile services. The second one is -- because of this it will allow us to deliver services to homes that previously would be done because most homes only have slow connection. The same thing can be said about mobile technology. The second one is from the software perspective with web 2.0 technologies and with the ease of use of the development of [ Indiscernible ] technologies that otherwise cannot be done in a previous technologies.

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As we observe it is expected that the need for rehab services will grow over time. This especially, the key is for advanced countries such as Europe, United States and Japan. The population is getting older. The rate of disabilities will grow with that. And then, also, from the provider-perspective the number of providers will not be growing. We face the problem of more need and more available services with the technology, but less available providers. These are the reasons which it's more and more important in the coming years. That concludes the first minisession. We'll have panel discussion. I would like to invite Dr. Sajeesh Kumar and David Brennan to comment.

Sorry, could you adjust? Yes, thank you.

Thank you.A wide range of definitions were mentioned. He included the definition from RERC. The definitions with the technology used, the methodologist used, the stress is methodology. It should be patient-focused also, other than technology. A little bit of shift towards the patient attention. The end user is the patient. We're doing all this technology. The definition must reflect the need of that. AT, definition of telemedicine, it says to improve patient health status. There's a stress on patient health status. We can include that to include this the definition. This is included in the long definition. I would love to hear your comments on focus on patient, maybe you can send it back to us. Another point I noted is as Dr. Bambang mentioned, the 2002 paper, it's outdated now. Telementoring was not mentioned in that paper. This is coming up new. Telementoring, not just for newcomers, but those already in the field, training and medical education purpose, telementorring is another thing to look into.

And the last slide is about whether [ Indiscernible ] will grow. Dr. Bambang aptly put some points. I would love to hear comments from all of you. We had to check, the fact is not just country wanting to grow, the growth, there are other factors which are like various [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ] growth. You know the cost. The issues of cost and reimbursement, legal issues. And so many other things. This will be a topic which will be discussed in coming days. We have to take these barriers as opportunities in the future. Reimbursement, local, cost issues these have to be seen in the light of an opportunity to discuss and bring us as a community together and to show the way forward. Over to David now.

Thank you. Thank you.

Hi, Dave.

How you doing? Thanks again for having us. Hopefully I wasn't able to clean my office, I apologize for the clutter. I see we're starting to get questions in. That's the point of this. I want to leave it open to others to give their questions. A few comments regarding definitions. You did a very good job of tackle an issue of what is telerehab, telehealth, telecare. These have been debated for a long time. I think the [ Audio Cutting In and Out ] the definitions you came up with are by far -- for me the most important thing -- I teach a class in telemedicine. You can take any word and put tele in front of it and it means do it at a distance. It is all about the patients. Implying moving information, not people. There's benefits. We're finding more and more benefits, we don't have have to move the people. There are benefits to the organizations, to the caregivers. We will hear a lot of examples over the next couple of days. Secondly, the last point, the final slide, I think [ Indiscernible ] will grow. I think we all hope that telerehabilitation will grow. The population is getting older. A lot of chronic conditions. I think we recognize that. The last day we'll get at this. Unless we work at changing policy and generating the body of research that shows that this works -- we've been working on this for close to a decade, we hope it will continue to grow. I think there are a lot of obstacles in our way. I think we need to address them and move forward. With that, I think -- I'm not sure how you want to handle taking questions from the audience --

Okay. We'll open questions from the participants. You can do it through typing in the chat window.

If you would like to participate with us, please type your questions into the chat room pod.

We will wait for another 60 seconds before we move on, for any questions to be entered into the discuss before we move on.

I'm seeing a couple of questions. Do you have that window open on your screen? I can read them out if you would like --

Sure.

The first does the patient obtain the same level of care as going to a facility? I think that will be addressed later on. The goal behind anything in telemedicine is providing at least the same level of care. I think there are number of benefits that could arise from services remotely. There's potential pitfalls and problems that also might arise. Hopefully that answered that question. Did you get that window yet?

I would like to add to the point from Dave. In telerehabilitation -- [ Audio Cutting In and Out ] -- usually what we do we have any project is to compare the telesession with the in-person session and see if there's differences. That's easily part of the classic research. The answer is that's always part of the consideration. Usually to have a valid telerehabilitation services we have to prove that the quality is as good as the in-person session.

Second question -- asking if --

I will -- do you want --

No, no.

The second question, wondering if there's opportunities built into telerehabilitation. I'm not sure what opportunities -- I'm wondering if there's opportunities -- opportunities built into telerehabilitation.

Looking at this question, I think it's my duty here, I take the chance to give a case scenario. I think there's some questions followed requesting for more about the service. I will give a case. People listening can give others. Let's take a case of a lady staying in a remote area, let's call her Maggie. Maggie she got [ Indiscernible ], a recent stroke. The right-hand side, she has pain in the right shoulder. She goes to the local hospital. The OT takes care of her. This local hospital OT who is taking care of Maggie, he decided to let us have a second opinion from a neural [ Indiscernible ]. They decide to do this. Using videoconferencing they talk to a specialist in OT in neurological disorders, 45 minute high-tech videoconference. They had a consultation. During that the specialists asks them to demonstrate the pain areas and assess the condition. Everything occurs within 45 minutes. The difference between the areas could be 200 or 300 miles. The decision is there is changes in the intervention plan. They decided to go for a functional stimulus for her right shoulder. It improved the condition of Maggie. This is a simple case scenario that I give.

Are there any comments?

Thanks.

There's quite a few questions.

One of the questions is about the definition. Have any funding agencies come up with definition? Again, I would like to mention that some of the questions might be answered in the following minisessions. Also, some of the questions might be relevant to the next few days of sessions, instead of this one. Most of the definitions that we came across, that we observed from the federal agencies or from other sources usually fall into one of the four that we discussed. They represent the definition by the organization or paper that we quoted but also are similar to definitions from agencies.

The short answer for the second part of the question, right now telehas been and reimbursement is one of the biggest challenges. I believe that will be discussed on day four. I don't know off of the top of my head, I don't recall, what services close to telerehabilitation are funded by Medicare and Medicaid. There are some home health applications that may come close. As a rule of thrum reimbursement through Medicare is challenging. For now the answer is no.

Thank you, Dave.

Anything --

The next question that we have right now is what are your suggestions regarding who should be on the research team for telerehabilitation projects? This one is connected to the other questions, which mention that in their health service telemedicine is a service provided by doctors and nurse.

Sajeesh is the expert in this area.

It looks like a very general question. If you are looking from a telerehabilitation [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ] it's a broad area, again. Most of the research goes into OT area, PT area -- [ Audio Cutting In and Out ]. If you are doing an OT focus, have an occupational therapist. The previous question was on associations involved and their definitions. This applies to the research areas. What we need is a white paper, or a position statement from each association's perspective. A definition was given just now in the first session. Physical therapy's perspective, what is their definition. You can have research people involved in their particular areas.

I will add to that. [ Indiscernible ] uses a term called telepractice. It brings up a final challenge. The reason they chose that term is that the providers of speech and language pathology don't always practice in healthcare. Some practice in school, would never use the word rehab, they use the word therapy. The issue of link gis particulars and semantics, it seamless major. Can you look at it on both sides. For some its splitting hairs. [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ]. Just to keep in mind, the terminology has a lot of similarities.

That's very good point, Dave. Thank you for that. We will revisit that issue. In the second minisession we'll be discussing that. That's part of the problem we face with the term rehab. There's a question about what kind of technology needs to have to make it accessible. For tomorrow's session we'll be discussing that. I'm sorry, Wednesday. I would like you to join us for Wednesday's session. We will have discussion and survey about these issues more in depth than today. Please ask the question for Wednesday's session.

Thank you for all of the questions. I'm sorry we cannot answer all of them. We will try to answer them over email, if possible. We'll move on to the next minisession. What we try to accomplish in the second minisession is try to review the landscape.To do that we will review using the framework that has been provided by Jack Winters. It's worth mentioning that, of course, by focusing on these we have -- we miss many of the areas, as mentioned by Sajeesh. There are many surfaces, many papers published out there that we can actually categorize it as telerehabilitation, but it doesn't mention telerehabilitation or rehab.

What we plan to do, first we tried to review all of the papers that related to telerehabilitation. The first one is to retrieve the papers from pub med. We searched in the past ten years of all papers related to telerehabilitation. These are the terms that we used. The problem is telerehabilitation is very new term. Many of the papers that actually telerehabilitation doesn't use this key word. In order to mitigate the problems we use the key wordless of teleconsultation and rehab, et cetera. We also used more specific words such as telepractice. We found that most of the support key words have been included in the search that we used with the five possible key words.

Now what we found is there are 238 papers related to telerehabilitation. That's a very, very small fraction, compared to more than 8000 papers if you use "telemedicine." The word is still not widely used. Many papers did not use either the telerehabilitation or rehab terms or key words. We did the search again with Andi this morning, if you use telemedicine and rehab there are about 500 papers. The distribution is very similar to what we have.Even with 500 papers that we retrieved it's still between 1.5% of the overall papers in telemedicine. That tells us how small telerehabilitation is compared to telemedicine. That tells us that telerehabilitation is still not popular. And the key words of telerehabilitation and rehab is not as popular as telemedicine. They still use the term telemedicine. I would like to turn over the discussion to Andi, Andi will present his review of papers from pub med and the examples that represent rehab services. Thank you.

Thank you. This table shows us the distribution of the telerehabilitation-related paper review that we did. We categorized it into five different categories. The first one is the teleconsultation, mainly focused on the face to face model of telerehabilitation. We found 61 papers that can be categoried into teleconsultation. One example is the paper from Brennan in 2004. The focus is in the speech and language therapy.

The second is telemonitoring. We found 36 papers inside in category. An example for this category is the paper from Piette. It talks about heart failure. The data is then used to help build a care management for the particular client.

The third category is telehome care. We found 36 papers. An example from Hoenig.

The fourth is teletherapy. [ Audio Cutting In and Out ]. We have 68 papers. The brain injury people [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ].

The fifth category is the other telerehab service. We found 45 papers that can be categorized in this area.

The first category is teleconsultation. Defined as the standard face to face model. [ Audio Cutting In and Out ]. Consultation is videoconferencing, because of the need of interactive of realtime communication. Very good examples are accessive device prescription and [ Audio Cutting In and Out ].

This slide here show us an example of an AT. It's a product that we have. [ Interference ]. The clinics are in the rural area. They will expand the availability of service. In their assessment the experts will communicate and talk directly with the clinician and help them to identify potential problems or steps that are missing from their assessment. This consultation can be applied to many, many fields such as wheelchair or augmentive communication devices.

Next is a similar process. The main focus is in education of the rural area of therapy. The idea is the rural area therapist will gather the data and send it to an expert in the metropolitan area for a second opinion. The data will be transferred back to the rural therapist, they will have personalized options for the clients themselves.

The second category is telehome care. It's a coordination effort to deliver service to the client's home. There's inhome teletraining, home modification.

In the home teletraining the main focus is to deliver training of tasks such as daily living tasks, without the therapist going into the home. The therapist can see the clients doing their training at home and are available to provide feedback during the training session. Usually it also has a nurse to help the client to do their training in their home setting.

Second example is would we call the home modification assessment. Architects can gain a model of the client's home and give suggestions on how to make their client's home more accessible, or fit their device into their home setting. This one here is a project from our RERC which builds a model of the client's home environment that can be used by the architect and experts to navigate and build suggestions on how to change their home setting, or their home environment.

The third example is what we call the telesupport network. Which is built through a peer to peer network that supports information or resources from another person that also encountered the same problems, and probably already has a solution. That way this network aims to reduce the social isolation, allowing them for information into the healthcare or the possible healthcare they can gain.

The third category is telemonitoring. This is done usually through an unobtrusive assessment technology. The main difference between telemonitoring and home care is this covers the entire daily living of a person. They don't just focus on the home, but they also focus on the job setting, or their social setting. An example for this is the personal telemonitoring and job telecoaching.In personal telemonitoring the device can be a simple emergency call button all the way to a robotic engine that captures the data of each person and transfers it to the therapist or their clinicians.

In this slide it's done through the use of a shirt that has many sensors that can detect changes in the cardio or bodily signs, it gets transferred to the therapist.

In job telecoaching, providing of feedback for the client so that they can learn to do their job even without the need of a therapist that monitoring them every single second. In this slide we have an example of a remote behavioral assessment and job coaching using video and monitor technology. The idea of this slide is that a certain client with a brain injury can do their tasks, in this picture it's hamburger grilling, and getting feedback to remind them to [ Indiscernible ] so that they can perform their job in the most effective way possible.

Finally, the fourth category is the teletherapy, which is the most sophisticated branch of telerehabilitation. It's in the clinic or home setting. They are managed by therapists.

The main focus is to digitize what a therapist can find in a face to face environment and send it through a telecommunication network, the main advantage is that usually the digitized information is more sensitive.The slide is a virtual [ Indiscernible ] that transfers the rate of motion that can client can have through the internet.

The teleaudiology is in the area of speech and language pathology, which has seen a lot of success. This slide here shows, um, the therapy being transmitted through a very low band width network. The idea is the use of a store and forward method to mapture the data -- capture the data from the client and transfer it to the therapist. The focus is to capture the facial remarks and the gesture of the user.

Finally, the post surgical teletraining focuses on the self training of a client of a person that has been admitted to surgical, or a certain trauma. The focus is to use many applications to help users gain their training in an attended way. Those are the examples of the telerehabilitations that we have reviewed in our paper. I'm going to hand it back to Dr. Parmanto.

Thank you. Those are the categories from our literature review. Those examples we consider [ Indiscernible ] examples of every category that we defined in those four rehab services.

As it progresses the landscape also changes. For example, the availability of inexpensive -- [ Audio Cutting In and Out ].

will make the, I think, we'll the disbetween telehome care and telemonitoring.

The second one is the advances in mobile telemonitoring. [ Interference ]. There will be more applications in that area. This topic and the next minisession, I will skip the discussion and move on to -- we don't have much time -- to the model of telerehab services from informatics perspective. As we mentioned before, the intersections intersections [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ] sorry with the slide, just wait a bit.

Okay.

I will just continue. We will use the points that we mentioned in the previous discussion about intensity and duration. [ Speaker/Audio Faint or Unclear ] between telerehab and e-health are in home care and telemonitoring.

Okay. We will use these two characteristics to develop new model and we will use, we will develop four quadrant model. Instead of hierarchical you will be able to see the services in a different spectrum. We will move it around. Also, we can explain why the surfaces are not good for low band width.

Okay.

Okay, I'm sorry. Problem with -- this is not the last version. Okay. I'll move on. There's a slide missing, in addition to intensity and duration we can also view the different approach to telerehabilitation, mainly the realtime connectivity and also starting forward. We will revisit this over and over again. Let me just mention, in this model we put -- we tried to map all of the different telesurfaces, telemedicine, e-health into the intensity and duration axises. What intensity means, as we mentioned in the previous If they require blocks of intensive information exchange between two sides, that we consider it as high intensity service. While if the service is -- we can be done over e-mail, over fax, telephone lines, and exchange that service is considered with low ( indiscernible ) intensity. On the duration side, we side, the easy way to view it is that for example acute surface that's when mainly on the short duration side while the if it is chronic, done over time, even lifetime, that would be long duration service. As we can see in this nicely along those four terms. For example, surgery requires intensive communication twoan two sides because the surgeon on one side need to conduct surgery remotely, that will be very, very high intebs -- intensity service. Because surgerily easily is done in a matter of hours and can be done on the one time, then that easily we consider it as a short duration type of service. As we observe in this picture, most of the medicine fall under high intensity low duration services, and let's go back to the ( indiscernible ) half. Most of the ( indiscernible ) surfaces are lower off the quadrant. It means that it is mostly ( indiscernible ) we have require high intensity, for for for for example, teletherapy more resembles e-medicine than other type of tele rehab, so this will be able to map any of the teleservices nicely and how it will relate to other tele service, for example, we can see there that if there is any new services off the rehab and we can map it very, very nicely. This model can also help us ( indiscernible ) surgery will require very high ( indiscernible ) and mostly will require interactive communications with ( indiscernible ) of service.I cannot view it right here.

Most telerehabilitation services will fall under low intensity and high -- yeah, that's very good, low intensity and high and long duration, so, for example, the teleideology, for example, all can be done over even plain old telephone network and whether it requires repetitive services, so that will fall under a long duration and low intensity telesupport network is the same thing. In-home teletraining can be done over the web, easily low intensity and can be done even using plain old telephone networks. We can combine this model with a model of ( indiscernible ) forward, so, for example, tele methodology although it is high intensity, but usually doesn't require intertiff connection between the rural clinic with hospital, for example, so even high intensity network can be delivered over slow connection if the therapies can be done using starting forward methods, so this map can be used in conjunction with store and forward interactivity model of delivery to analyze any type of surface that we know, so this provides a good and flexible model that is I think better than the fix ( indiscernible ) model as previously proposed by winters. This is -- this repeat the one we just mentioned, that model can analyze can be can be used to analyze service delivery and in addition to the mode that the transition can be used to analyze any type of surface that we -- that it currently available or will be available in the future.And the example that we have that most of the surfaces for example chronic service in telemedicine, while the traditional telemedicine for example acute therapies require high intensity and short duration while the chronic telerehab requires low intensity and long duration. And this four quarter model can also be used to analyze the dynamic interaction between the technology that is available out there and the rehab services, so if we have new infrastructure available that will afford us to deliver different kind of telerehab services or if we have slow connection and certain type of surfaces need to be delivered we can analyze it whether it can be delivered using store forward for example. So I will ask Sandeep to provide to discuss the telerehab services and ( indiscernible ) into the quad rant.

Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Parmanto. As we have discussed before, the telerehab communication may need three quadrants. ( indiscernible ) LD quad rant. This quad rant -- the characteristic of this quadrant is low intensity fraction, between the client and the provider, so the data transfer between the client and the provider is actually quite small small. Doesn't always talk about the size of the data that is being transferred or the information that is being transferred between the sites. However, the therapy is done over a long time, somewhat -- some of this rehabilitation service are done for over the lifelong. Good example of telerehabilitation service that falls into this quadrant are the telehome care and heel monitoring. -- telemonitorring.

The good thing about this, define range from ( inaudible ).

Captioner: Audio is cutting in and out. Audio also sounds at times like it is being "fast forwarded."

It has to be able to retain the rehabilitation data over time. We are talking about services that will stick with the client for probably more than two but over their period of time is lifelong service. Therefore, the best structure to support this kind of need is to store and forward synchronous infrastructure. Why? Because the store and forward infrastructure allows data retention. Store and forward infrastructure data is forward and before forwarded to the purpose that meets the data and even at the service side of the data is stored in a way that is easily manageable and easily re retrievable.

In fact, using the store and forward we can transfer very large data from one side to another site in a smaller chunk, meaning that even though a big dated a can be split into smaller files or smaller data, and transmitted over a period of time. Therefore the bandwidth connection required is a low to medium band citd connection -- bandwidth connection. What is needed by the network, however, is a network that can support multiple type of data and can be interfaced easily with the devices that is used for the telerehabilitation service. An example of the network that can support this is the plain old telephone system. The wireless network such as the ( indiscernible ) currently available connected to the iPhone, for example, and also the internet.

The second quadrant that is used by the telerehabilitation service is the high intensity and short duration quadrant. The main characteristic of this quadrant is that there is an intense active interaction between the client and the provider, and usually it is done in a short period of time. In a sense this is similar to the traditional telemedicine service and an example of this is a fairly intensive teleconsultation between two clinics, two clinicians that is ( indiscernible ) about the best therapy for a client or even a direct ( indiscernible ) where they need to analyze the gestures or the behavior of a client.

Therefore most of this quadrant is in the clinical setting where the network can support an information ( indiscernible ) bursts. The requirements realtime interactivity. [ audio cutting out ] most of the service in this quadrant use high quality conference with realtime interaction tools such as white board or a screen that the clients or clinicians can do the work. Therefore the bandwidth connections to want support the infrastructure is medium to high speed bandwidth connection. The network requires a reliable and secure network, and an example of this network are ISDN, APM or even internet ( indiscernible ). The third quadrant that in the telerehabilitation service is the high intensity and long duration quadrant. It is similar to the high intensity and short duration quadrant in which there is an intention fraction between the client and the service provider. However, it is done in short sessions when conducted frequently over time.In teletherapy it can range from delivering therapy to the client's home all the way to clinical setting. IfIt can utilize synchronous and nonsynchronous network. Therefore, the requirements to support is a network that is flexible because the need of the teletherapy is directly connected to the therapy it is providing. The network has to be able to accommodate with whatever therapy that is being delivered. For example, a therapy that needs (audio cutting out) realtime interaction network ideology can use a medium to low bandwidth infrastructure to support them. Also the network has to be able to accommodate integration of multiple systems. Some therapy may need post conference and forward data transfer. So the ideal network to support the teletherapy is by using internet.

Yes?

Thank you, Andy, and I would like to apologize we have a problem with PowerPoint, and we didn't have the last latest version, but as we will fix it so we will have the latest version in the next two meeting sessions, and we will have discussion, panel discussion and also question and answer from participants while we ( indiscernible ) to provide comment. Could you pull up --

Yes.

Yes, how are you doing?

(multiple speakers).

Captioner: There is a very distinct echo. Very difficult to understand what is being said and a lot of feedback.

I think it is very hard to generalize even within --

I am sorry, could you turn off the speaker?

I am sorry.

My apologies.

Is that better?

Better.

I forgot that.

Captioner: There is still a lot of echo.

It is difficult to generalize the quadrant model you specified and did a fairly good job.

Is that the case?

Yes.

I believe we are still receiving your audio. Through the microphone.

( inaudible ).

Captioner: If they are still speaking, I cannot hear anything at this time. It looks like David is speaking, but I cannot hear him.

Captioner: I am not hearing any audio.

Okay. Please go ahead, David.

The point I was trying to make when the audio was cutting out was that I think there are a lot of different applications of telerehab, and that may happen within the same patient within the same session by the same therapist that a lot of different modalities may be used, so perhaps a live audio video consultation may be used for some part of the session and the therapist may switch and pull up something like a white board, do some cognitive tasks, if physical therapy is involved might be using some sort of electronic senz ors, a groom teres or other data devices to capture other information, so I think while the quadrants do a very good job of breaking down and helping to visualize the way the different modes of services all interact in terms of information technology, I think it is just really important for everyone to remember that a lot of times they do kind of move around within those four quadrants, and I think also despite having some fairly poor information technologies, someone before was talking about technology push, and I think a lot of the early work in telerehab really was driven by what was available (audio cutting out) even generally in telemedicine back in the 50s when they started doing teleradiology or telepathology, they were using equipment not designed at all for telemedicine, just supplied it to telemedicine. If you look at the early work in telerehab people were using ( indiscernible ) phones not because they wanted poor blocking video but because it is all that was available. Now we're at a point where I think we're starting to see telerehab drive technology a little bit and doing pushing rather than just pulling what's available, so that was one point I wanted to make. The other thing I wanted to add in in telemonitorring there are definitely other examples and we're seeing some of this come out of the ( indiscernible ) where tell monitoring living environment I think we'll see a lot of growth in that we already have with some smart data, algorithms and wearable sensors and other technologies related to that. Those are my main points.

Thank you. That's why I agree with all of your points, and I probably ( indiscernible ) points in the white paper mainly first is that the definition of the services, it has changed with the newer technology. For example, as you mentioned that monitoring telehome care can change becoming more intensive or less intense active with available technology and also I think we will mention in the next session about the I think more and more services will be integrated services, so we will have different modalities, different type of services, in one single clinical service, so we'll also have that discussion as well in the white paper. Those are excellent points.

I would like to ask ca ( indiscernible ) to provide comments as well.Sajeesh to provide comments as well.

( indiscernible ) went to the literature first, and it is really reflects the state of art of our telerehab ( indiscernible ). It is really interesting to see the technologies really progressing at dramatic pace but doesn't really reflect in the published literature. By going to lited sure ( indiscernible ) came with about 200 and maybe less than 300 people, and (audio cutting out) this morning just few hours back when before coming here I was searching my favorite search engine, Yahoo, and 800 sites, but that doesn't reflect in the scientific journals, so what's lacking here is scientific publication in telerehabilitation. More so for engaged in ( indiscernible ) and other activities, but this published research, if you go to the 238 research publications, most of them come from very few limited areas like publications from occupational therapy, physical therapy, and sleep language pathology areas, stroke areas, and even if very small numbers of subjects, and ( indiscernible ) randomized controlled studies, these are the things we need and two words scientific positioning of our telerehabilitation. Journals, journals has to be ( indiscernible ) service, so I think if there was an international journal of telerehabilitation coming up, and alot of opportunities are there, and we need a scientific base of (audio cutting out) all this, and the main complaint from the patient's perspective is that still go for face-to-face preferred because they feel ( indiscernible not just satisfied but given an opportunity to go face-to-face what is lacking here is something called human element missing human element. The technology is trying to overcome by saying, okay, video and audio, so we can see, we can talk, you can ( indiscernible ) kind of virtual attach feeling of attached, and the other sensory organs like even pretty much going on smell transmission over the net, so that the difference sensory or stimuli can be used in this environment. ( indiscernible ) technical expert, and he is taking questions from audience.

I think because we don't have much time, so what I plan to do is to go over the two related (audio cutting out) sessions because it will be short, and then I will have ( indiscernible ) questions at the end so that we accomplish -- we can finish everything by using the time that allocated to us. Then we'll also do poll, so we'll discuss what are the new opportunities and what are the potentials more or less the problem with a new technology that we can anticipate in the next few years? The first one is imagine that in face-to-face sessions the session itself is usually not recorded, and while in telesessions everything potentially can be recorded, so ( indiscernible ) information for research and information previously not available for monitoring, for outcome, now that we have all this information we can go back and evaluate. We can see all what have gone wrong or what ( indiscernible ) can be done for that. That's potential, and also the potential for data mining ( indiscernible ) data, and unprecedented, and then imagine also the potential for education, so instead of doing shadowing our students, interns, and residents, for example, can go offer the sessions, and if you have thousand of sessions we can categorize so it is more of life library of the clinical sessions, what happened in the past years using this type of information, and also potential by having recorded sessions and by having more information available to us with telerehab and not to mention thing that we have mentioned at the beginning with potential of new service or potential of reaching under served population with availability of broadband technology and mobile technology, for example. Those are the potential that we see in the future, but with gross potential we also have emerging challenges and problems as well. The first one is the problem with privacy and confidentiality. Again, I am sorry we have problem with the PowerPoint. It is not synchronizing for web participants. The participant is like frozen or it is not moving too.

Okay. Too many things going on.Okay. So those are the challenges within the next few years. First is with those potential, also problem with we need to address the privacy and confidentiality, by having everything recorded happened, and I heard about colleague in medical centers having problem with that, and so the lawyers and privacy officers reviewing and don't want the recording happen actually, so that's the first challenge, and then the second challenge is as we move the services more toward consumer, then we'll have problem with the consumer because currently system not designed for consumers but for clinicians which usually more professional than general population, and then the third challenge is with ( indiscernible ) information how to manage this complex information, so this just to give you an example of the type of media that we had dealing with, so from video, voice, images, and ( indiscernible ) so first challenge is managing complex ( indiscernible ) advances and this is especially true for the rehab because the ( indiscernible ) over a long period of time, so the data is complex and repetitive, and we have to manage it over time, and the question is how would we organize this kind of information? How would we organize it so that we can gain insight to it, how clinicians can view the data nicely or better than, and I mentioned at the beginning about the potential for education and ( indiscernible ). How would we represent this information to students and to interns, for example, and how would we organize the data so that it can lend I itself into mining good information out of the data and as well as the problem with privacy and confidentiality, so as I mentioned that telerehab will generate new information that previously not recorded, video monitor devices, ( indiscernible ) with the availability of internet, this can be stored centralized and will have enough information, and the problem is how would we deal with privacy and confidentiality, and the second problem with the security and/or with all of this monitoring devices transmitted over public connection because we envision that internet will be used for most of this services, so how would we protect the system, and then problem is as we where bring more and more services to homes and to consumers, we have the challenge of how to design the system that is more usable. We have human interface problem that we need to address that previously not that important because previously we are dealing with clinicians and we can ( indiscernible ) them and their numbers, and trend them easily and come back and we have to trend house and consumers at home, so those are the challenges that we will face in the next few years.

We'll move on with opportunities in technologies, and we list the thing that I think will have profound effect on telerehabilitation services. The first one is the high speed interfet. As some of you know internet will make internet speed much faster and also will deliver current service that previously not available in the current internet service, and in the second one is the availability of broadband connection almost anywhere right now, the penetration of broadband services can reach roughly ( indiscernible ) people 90% or close to 100% in some Asian countries like Korea and Japan, so that will allow us to thrifer more and more services to home -- deliver more and more services to home that previously cannot be done, and the third one is the web 2.0, and advantagement in software that loss to more integrated services like what Dave Brennan mentioned previously, so more and more services will be integrated not only just teleconsultation but teleconsultation as well as tell therapy, as well as teleeducation, for example. That can be bundled bundled together into single service.

( indiscernible(audio cutting out) with emerging of these two hyping, high definition and high bandwidth that would allow us to deliver a better ( indiscernible ) as we can see that our videoconferencing is very chop choppy, and the watt quality is not as good. We have more problems, so this thing that I think as we are in this session today for this, and this kind of service will get better and better by day. Somehow we will to stick up the signs like this, and in much better format like come back to what we have today. So those are the -- one thing we would like to mention is that you're telerehabilitation services are based primarily on the internet because the internet will be better and better, so everything will be delivered over the internet. The one thing is that ( indiscernible ) off the internet because internet is currently available just to provide quality of service, or teleconsultation to homes or other clinics. We don't want the connection to drop so that it will be frozen like what we have today or some of the suddenly the connection is cut off. Those will be ( indiscernible ) for some of the clinical services. We expect that we in the future or the next few years this type of connection will be better and better, and will allow us to deliver services because the internet will provide sort of minimum current service so the connection will be -- won't drop slower than certain speed, and then also recently in the past few months, a lot of discussion about dib computing meaning SEC and Google we can store everything over the internet, and we can store massive amount of data including videoconferences and videoconferences and everything over the internet, so with cloud computing, so the location of the server doesn't really matter any more, and we'll see more and more data will be stored in the cloud, and ( indiscernible ) thoroughly, and it is available any time, 24/7. And also we'll observe that another reason why telerehab is not delivered over the internet because we want (audio cutting out) close system that we can control. There are a lot of drawbacks with that kind of system, so we'll expect that more and more service will be delivered over the internet because the internet will provide more open system and more flexible and allow us to deliver integrated services, offer more proprietary technology, and I would like to turn this to Andy to discuss a bit about the potential of the internet and also the one of the challenges with evidence-based medicine.

Thank you, Dr. Parmanto. As Dr. Parmanto has stated and also been support by our panel of experts, the development of telerehabilitation service right now is pointing toward a multi-data service delivered over multiple telecommunications applications, but it is integrated to support the telerehab service that they provide. In this kind of setting the internet opened potential of doing such things. The availability of web 2.0 technologies allows the users from therapies from clinicians pool their resources together to deliver the service. In addition to that, the open source initiative gives us the basic modules or the ( indiscernible ) to build a solution to deliver telerehabilitation services. The idea is that the integration will create a single point of access, a single communication channel for ultimate I am applications. For example, the service that requires both videoconference and also physician support system can be integrated into one application instead of using the systems in a separate parallel way which is happening right now. The idea from inte disbraition that the data can be exchanged between the systems easily without multiple best of my best of my bridges between the systems to share the data, for example, from the videoconferences, to the electronic health records or from additional support system to a videoconference.

The internet is ideal network to support this because of four advantages. The first is the use of access Dr. Parmanto has already talked about the ease of access because of the high rate of penetration of internet hey bandwidth internet in the world. Second one is because it is expandable. We can create new modules or new applications or new systems to deliver a new services without having to reveal the entire infrastructure. We just have to build a moderate yelt and plug it into the system that is currently available. Third one is that it is capability, meaning ( indiscernible ) or new services can be deployed easily and interact directly dish telerehab service that is currently available without a lot of hassle because all of those services will be built using the same protocol, and the availability of the open source initiative and the web 2.0 technologies also can ( indiscernible ).

The second potential challenge and opportunity as well is the need of evidence-based telerehabilitation services. The idea is any technology or any service can only be adapted if it has proof that the service is actually delivers or actually over ( indiscernible ) has been done in the regular. Idea of creating an evidence base for telerehabilitation service has been there for awhile, but I believe that there is a need for telerehabilitation protocol on top of the standardized telemedicine data in the sense this data protocol will help detract or evidence-based telerehabilitation service because this dated a can be used in research or many other research study to support or create evidence on telerehabilitation services. An example of the data set include our list in the PowerPoint here I am going to focus on the telerehabilitation. First is the function of independence measure that may share for example the ability or function of capability of the client or even a geriatric ( indiscernible ) for other older adult population, and the secondary is interim that is designed to assess the current condition for person with rehabilitation condition.

Before we move onto the panel discussion and as from participants, we would like to do polling, so I would like everybody to answer the poll. I think there are like five, right, the first one is what we have, what do you think if telerehabilitation is ( indiscernible ) or separate intersects with telemedicine.We have there that it is as of now we'll close the first poll.

Yep.

Okay. So as we close, 85% think that it is a separate and 15% think it is ( indiscernible ).This probably also. The second poll. Which area that you are working on, either working on or interested in, we would like to know.I like that it is realtime.

Right, right.

People have changed. Okay. We'll close the poll. We'll close the poll right now. It is interesting that telehomecare is not as popular among participants as we thought.

Somebody comment you can only choose one.

I see. I got it. We can only choose one, then, yeah, that's probably explain that most of us were interested in general telerehabilitation, but interesting that teletherapy is very popular and then followed by teleconsultation and telemonitorring. Thank you for the poll, and then can we pull out the third poll?

The first one?

The third one.

We have five, I think.

Right.

So what kind of connection do you use for your current telerehab system or telerehab that you know?

( inaudible ).

Sorry about that. Sorry about that.

We'll close the poll in a few seconds. Please. We'll close the poll. So, well, as we probably believe that internet becoming more and more dominant, but what interesting is it is plain old telephone still very, very popular, and I think that's partly I think because availability of internet and hopefully the services will change to the internet once becomes available, and ISDN getting probably less and less popular than the internet, still part of the telerehab services right now. The next question is which part of quadrant that can characterize your current telerehab services or telerehab services that you plan or that you know?

Okay. We'll close in two seconds. Thank you. This is rather surprising. We thought that most telerehab or the majority of it will be part of low intensity, intensity, long duration, but it turned out that the number one is high intensity long duration, and teletherapy, so similar to that, and the second one is low intensity long duration. That's also that we didn't really expect. So that's really interesting. So, wow, that mean that is we need to explore more of this area and why is it the case? While high low intensity -- well, low intensity long duration, the second one which makes sense, and then high intensity short duration that's also interesting, and if we sum it up, many of the telerehab services working on the high intensity one, which quite surprising, and that means that more and more telerehab services are very advanced because that requires high intensity connection between the two sites sites. Thank you.

Okay. We close that one, and then how about the fifth poll? Which technology you think --

This will have multiple answer.

Thank you. We'll close that one. I think we have another question, but I think the question is -- slight mistake in the question. Actually, what are the main issues, can we pull out that one?

I don't know which one you're talking about.

The 6 one, number 6. I am sorry. There is a slight mistake there. Web 2.0 there is privacy and confidentiality, so what are the problems that we will face so use web 2.0 as privacy and confidentiality there that we will face in the future.We'll close it in five seconds.There is a question about can we repeat the survey in the blog? I think we will accommodate that one, and I think can we -- we repeat it on the blog. The poll. The answer is because we found that the research of very interesting in the sense that a lot of it we didn't expect it, so I think that we can use it as a basis for discussions, and it is also interesting that usability is probably one single issues that is the most important for our future telerehab services. Thank you, everybody, and again we will put the poll in the blog, and thank you for that suggestion. I think it will be an excellent one, and we'll move onto panel discussion, and then we will have question and answers from the participants, so I would like to invite Dave from national rehab in Washington, D.C. Dave, I hope you're not sleeping.

Still awake.



I am still awake. I took all the poll questions.

I would like to get your comments.

Great. Let me go through. I wrote some notes here. Great discussion of the future. I think even since the four years you have had the RARC, I am sure you have seen tremendous amounts of change in the area of inform attics and web 2.0, and the very fact we're able to do this with I don't want to say fairly minimal effort because I think I know what's going on behind the scenes, but the fact we have 82 people able to do this with not too much difficulty I think speaks worlds to where technology is. I will go through my thoughts in at least the order that I had written them down through your slides and talking about new opportunities, you were speaking with -- about potentially with things electronically things are able to be archived for training purposes, and another application we will see more of, remote supervision of therapy training students, and I think this puts a lot of opportunity putting therapists into someone with an onsite supervisor who can do remote supervision, and I think a general trend in terms of the some of the privacy issues you were talking about, I know -- I mean, I have gotten calls and I am sure the folks at Penn have as well how do we solve the HIPAA challenge, what do we do for telerehab with HIPAA, and the fact of the matter is there is nothing specific the guidelines state relative to telerehab other than just the bear bones but don't lay out exactly what you have to do. Now that I think information technology is really driving so much of generalized healthcare and generally liesed rehab, I know our rehab hospitals finally after a long delay launching the full electronic medical records system in the first of the year, so I think as we're seeing a lot more IT get involved in general healthcare, some of these issues of how do we go about securing data, data, how do we go about privacy, when do you need a VPN to access the network, certain issues like this, I think telerehab will benefit from that by being able to leverage kind of momentum going behind the healthcare industry as a whole.One or related comment, I would be curious to get your take on it from your end as you do more of the internet application, and we're seeing a lot more consumer centered services in healthcare, things like Google and Microsoft health really putting healthcare applications into the hands of patients, and that's sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. I think trends will play out, but we're seeing alloted more even home care devices, the continual alliance and other related providers taking medical devices like blood pressure, blood pressure devices, weight scales, and essentially letting you buy those straight from CVS with the ability to plug into the computer and up load the data and manage it yourself. If consumers are able to manage that themselves, the healthcare providers could benefit as well.

From a consumer centric side of things, Andy, I know you talked about open source. We're seeing things like the iPhone, the Google phone, very, very high tech devices that essentially released to the general public, here is a software very easy to use, write your own application. For researchers, I think we see a tremendous potential rather than having to fight against the stream of manufacturers it really let's us build technology that we need that our consumers need and not that they tell us we need. We're still for better, for worse using technologies developed for business conferences that are developed for the corporate tell commuter and not necessarily for an elderly patient living at home trying to access their speech therapist, so with open sourced technologies we can really solve some of these usability issues right at the point of development rather than having to kind of put a band aid around a system and some duct type and hope that the consumer at home doesn't click on the wrong button because it could crash their application. I think some of the audio issues we had today may have been inadvertently caused by me accidentally clicking some of the wrong buttons, so I think we're seeing this trend kind of putting the power into the hands of consumers, and I think from the -- we need more research to drive this field forward, and I think from the technology side of things we're at a point where we can really build the applications we need to move forward.

Thank you, David. Sajeesh.

David, I agree with the comments you made, and coming back and looking at the service we just had, it is really interesting and really reflects the state of the telerehabilitation and services. The survey showed almost 70% of us still prefer internet and our main concern is to have public use of friendly devices. That's really reflect -- just the other day was reading a report by forest, and they came up with this new survey on U.S. on line uses of healthcare products, and list on there more than 50% of the people still not aware of healthcare technologies available on line osh healthcare on line services available, and those who really know about this technologies less than one person of them use this technologies on line. That's are where we stand now. The public are not aware of it even if they don't go beyond that limit and Les than 1% of them really use is it, so there is immense potential to go into that kind of market and to communicate with consumers, the potential consumers and I think there is a high area for us telerehabilitation practice measure educate the community and availability of the service and make ( indiscernible ) for user friendly. I think that is a human and computer interaction research. A lot of research is going on using smart pens and voice interactions, and I think along with the time the cost of the devices, hardware, it is not just the fiber optic connections or internet web tool, and the device people are ( indiscernible ) service from the people's perspective, so I think eventually the devices will be more portable and more affordable and that will be our stepping stones towards potential for telerehabilitation, and I am seeing a bright future for us.

Thank you, Sajeesh. We would like to open questions from participants, and then we'll discuss the questions and we'll comment and the panel will ( indiscernible ). I would like to ( indiscernible ).

We have three questions pending.

Okay.

The first question is are there any government agencies participating in the rehabilitation?

The veterans administration, well, I guess we can go back to terminology for a second. The veteran's administration is probably one of the largest current providers of some as spekts of telemedicine, and what they're doing is in the area of telehomecare. They do some degree of live consultation, but what the veterans affairs -- what the veterans administration is doing relates a lot to remote management of chronic diseases, so diabetes, congestive heart failure, COPD. They do have some patient who is are receiving rehab follow-up care using in-home messaging devices. I know they have contracts with a number of vendors. They have I believe over 10,000 different in-home messaging devices they're currently collecting data from, and they're finding tremendous benefits both in terms of patient outcomes and cost reductions for them. I know in speaking to some of the folks I know at the VA the disease management protocols that they use for diabetes care for example which would be a series of questions that are delivered to the patient at home on a small messages device, the patient answers at a predefined interval. I believe they have finalize and had have approved a series of questions for rehab, and it is fairly generalized, and I don't know specifically what patient population they're targeting, but they're getting more involved in rehab as we're seeing more of our Iraqi war and Afghanistan veterans coming home, transitioning from the DOD healthcare service into the VA health service, we're going to probably see a large growth in terms of what they're doing with cognitive rehab as well, so we'll see some areas there.

Thank you, David, for a comprehensive answer on that. I think in addition to VA, DOD is probably also moving towards that direction. We know of some of us participate in the COMA projects, the goal is to provide monitoring and connection between soldiers who coma patients and with their families, but that's -- my impression is it is not as well established as one in the VA, currently one of the largest services in rehabilitation.

Question is how about the state government agencies?If you would like to take that question, Dave.

I will try. Maybe from the questioner, can you clarify what government agencies?

How about the state liable government agencies doing the sort of thing --

Rehab agencies. I see.

(multiple speakers) to be honest, I don't know vocational rehab offices. To be honest, I don't know, that's not unfortunately one of the areas I am too up on. I know there are some initiatives in states in terms of telemedicine. I think we're seeing a lot more growth in the rural states obviously than more of the urban states with demonstration projects. Unfortunately I don't have any specific information on that.

There is a session tomorrow that will be appropriate for that, and we have an expert on that, Dr. Mike McCue has been involved with we are service for quite a while. Another thing I would like to mention some of us also involved with a state agency with Pennsylvania Department of Health providing services for children with autism. That is part of the here the hospital here provide services to rural areas. That's through State Department of health, and again please ask the question tomorrow to Dr. McCue. He has been involved with state VR agencies all moving towards that direction providing telerehabilitation services. Thank you for the question. Move onto the next question.

The next question is similar ( inaudible ).

Yeah. Yeah. We have answer to that question about state agencies, so some of us involved with department of health and also please ask the question tomorrow to VR agencies of the state.Probably be more appropriate for tomorrow. Comments on that.

There was a comment here from earlier about the long-term care industry.

Yes. That's the comment that long-term care industry will be more interested in EITM homecare than CRC.

( inaudible ).

Certified rehabilitation counseling. That's what we would expect, and that's one of our main interests as well, and we were rather surprised that telehomecare is not one of the --s want --s it is not really number one had it comes to the side of polling, so but from our observation that's probably one of the greeing field out there. The next question is about wireless video camera and availability.

Okay.

Which one?

( inaudible ).

I will repeat that. In OT, I need to assess the patient within multiple views of their environment and performing functional activities. Therefore I am looking for wireless video cameras with verbal communication to accomplish the task. There is access and have any other ideas on how to -- I would like to defer this to Andy who has been playing around with ( indiscernible ).

(multiple speakers).

There are a lot of ways to capture the video or the video camera with verbal communication communication. One of the cameras we're using right now is a Panasonic camera which can be used to streamline basically the video and the verbal communications from a remote site, and that will be discussed tomorrow during the clinical applications of the white paper, and also we have seen several other wireless networks that may will be able to accomplish this such as the use of iPhone and the 3G network, and also probably ( indiscernible ) phone. I have seen a couple of applications on top of the iPhone that is able to streamline the video and also audio from a remote site and quality is quite nice, using the 3G network, so the coming of the 3G network allows us to have a wireless connected activity with a very big bandwidth that is not available before, and I am sure that a lot of applications are being ( indiscernible ) right now on top of that network, and I believe we will have a lot more discussions on the technology, especially on the --

Wednesday.

Wednesday where we will talk more on the technology and also possible solutions to the telerehabilitation services. I am not sure what wireless that connection that you mention, that you're referring to, Andy mentioned about 3G, usually if you have wireless internet connection, the speed usually is even better, so I think if it is not a problem with 3G connection, it won't be much a problem with wireless internet connection because the speed easily is much better than even 3G. So you can send an e-mail to Andy about ( indiscernible ).

( laughter ).

For the discussion.

I saw there was also a question that somewhat related I think about how many people don't use the computer and don't have one. What would be your thoughts on the fact that a lot of what you talked about has been internet-based solutions, and I think I know where your answer will likely go, but traditionally enter net meant a computer, and I think we're seeing that kind of shifting away. I heard a story on NPR I think last week, and they were talking about the fact that the iPhone which is still a fairly pricey commodity for a lot of people are actually being used by a lot of folks in lower income. [ etds as their -- berk ets as their even internet device. You can essentially buy all of that in one for 40 or 50 or I am not sure what the monthly plan is. What would be your thoughts from the informatics side in terms of where, how do you get on the internet and how will that impact telerehab in the future?

Because when you first mentioned about somebody without computer, two things somebody without computer, without any connection or somebody like in very, very poor rural areas or somebody actually moving to the next group area in terms of technology which is what is called near computer, so I would like to answer the second one, and then to answer the first one Sajeesh is the expert on that. So I think the next growth will be what disw something called near computer, actually the what you mentioned something like iPhone, PDA, will be more and more powerful, and will have more and more feature of a computer, and also as we can see the price of this kind of devices almost as expensive as computer, but I think also the price will go down as technology matures, and I think that will be the growth area for everything, not on the telerehab but also internet application, mobile application, so I think we'll see more and more people use that one as a primary as you mentioned, primary communication and primary computer yet of having right now we have two, PDA, computer, and iPhone, and in the future I think the iPhone is the computer, and I think more and more services will move to that direction. I think right now in infancy, but I think that will be the next growth area in terms of neck -- technology as well as in terms of services as well as the area of telemedicine and telerehab.How are you ensuring telerehab for low income families who may not have access to computing or technology, and I would like Dr. Kumar to answer that because Dr. Kumar is a long experience with dealing with very low rural under served population in Australia, so I would like him to comment on that.

That's a big issue in telemedicine itself. We have to do a lot of cost comparison studies. In giving service to low income groups, telehealth really has one of the case where we had was older community with three-year ( indiscernible ) needed a power wheelchair, but in consultation with a city-based research group, what they could do was using the video technology we assessed what was her need for powered wheelchair, and luckily for her case we had one extra wheelchair lying around, and we could just 1EU7BDEsend it to her for trial, and from that case they can decide which wheelchair, and we had to do a little modification on joy stick and all those things so they can at least in terms of rushing to or making financial decision they can try all this available means around the world and not just in one place, so this is high tech. It is not high tech thing you need for all of this, simple video camera, and coming back to the position thatd technologies are available, it is not just internet because you can see the third world countries, David, never had any even plain old telephone system, so never had the infrastructure for internet-base, so what is now happening is really jumped into the wagon of satellites, look at India, China, they're going to ( indiscernible ) last week, India planted a flag on the moon, and China is also, and they're using satellites for healthcare, people in remote areas are getting mobile messages in case of accidents, what to do and how to talk to specialist in the city area. So the countries that the landscape is changing is not just internet-based or technology there in hand. It is coming more towards something called ( indiscernible ) technology, want normal based on laptop or desktop systems, people want everything in their hands, and this is amazing that third world countries can get their marketplace, what price to sell their product, what price they're to give to the healthcare provider, so they can compare and they can take best decisions, so a lot of opportunities in case in terms of the technology, the only thing is the cost, and a lot of studies needed to be published also in COLARIS compare -- cost comparison. It has been publish and had what we are looking for is cost base studies and maybe large case studies on randomized studies covering all as pex aspects of telerehabilitation and involvement of people is also a big issue, to get more and more people involved in telerehabilitation as such and writing and publication maybe journals and discussions like this must go. Thank you.

Also comments from participants that to combat the issue of families not having computers when the local school system changed computer at times they need to be updated, but we have people that will fix them and so it is basically transferring the -- from home to -- from schools to home.Okay. So we exactly three hours from now, so we 4:00, so we accomplished what we need to do today. Again, if you still have questions, please send us e-mail, and also please make comments on the blog, so we'll post it there and then so that we can continue the discussion, and thank you to the panel. Thank you to Dr. Kumar, and thanks a lot to Dave from National Rehab hospital in Washington, D.C., and it has been really productive discussion, and thank you, everybody, for participating, and thank you for being the ( indiscernible ) for the experiment today, all of us, and thank you for being patient that we went through the problems that we have and we will fix the problem and hopefully we will be much better tomorrow, and I will see you all tomorrow. Thank you. I would like Dr. McCue will --

I will say a few things.

Dr. McCue, will say a few words, and I see one comment that they like your tie.

( laughter ).

Thanks. Thank you, everyone, and I will not repeat the appreciation to all involved in this. It certainly was an interesting experience and hopefully something you gain some knowledge from and some insight about the informatics behind telerehabilitation. Apologies to Chris and Andrea who had some questions that didn't get responded to but as Bambang said we will respond to all of the questions. We'll say the question, include them in your blog and provide a response for you. I just want to give you a preview, a brief preview tomorrow. Tomorrow's paper is telerehab clinical and vocational applications for assistive technology, research, opportunities, and challenges, and that's authorized by Dr. Smallleer, Rich shine, myself, and Ken dray Betts, we'll have Barb Suzanne PAONE, Paul Weyman, Steven dolling, thingsling, topics are pressure ulcer prevention, virtual reality, speech language applications, vocational rehabilitation. We will have some illustrations of some work done at our RERC including our wheelchair me subscription project as well as our robotic job coaching project, so please tune in with us tomorrow for that paper. As a preview to that please visit our international journal of telerehabilitation site and download the paper so that you can preview that before the conference. That site is HTTP:// HTTP://telerehab.pit.EDU.Finally before I say goodbye, pleats complete your post test evaluations before logging off, and we hope to see you tomorrow. Thanks a lot. [ event concluded ]]