ETH RESC - Suva Funding Programme

Research Call 2 2022: Remote Rehabilitation

The ETH RESC – Suva Funding Programme has been established to support research and development that addresses challenges and opportunities in the areas of prevention, rehabilitation, assistance, inclusion, and health economics with a focus on accident-related injuries. The research grants are intended to promote interdisciplinary and translational research and development projects to establish new directions for future rehabilitation such as the holistic management of impairments along the continuum-of-care. The overall aim is to develop novel solutions for treatment and assistance to improve the accessibility and quality in rehabilitation medicine, and to make our environment more inclusive.

The present call initiates the first phase with the distribution of CHF 450’000, followed by the second call phase in 2023/2024 with a funding volume to be defined.

Research topic

Applicants are invited to propose novel approaches to strengthen outpatient rehabilitation towards the principle of "outpatient before inpatient" with a focus on “Remote Rehabilitation” in people with accident-related injuries.

The principle of "outpatient before inpatient" implies a combination of in- and outpatient rehabilitation and/or a substitution of inpatient rehabilitation measures. Both options are required to put special emphasis on outpatient treatments that may be provided as day-stay rehabilitation, or rehabilitation near the home/workplace. This setting has a more favorable cost-benefit ratio due to the proximity of the social environment, which can have a positive impact on recovery. However, current outpatient rehabilitation is mostly monodisciplinary (single physical therapy, occupational therapy, etc.) and lacks cost-effective and high-quality remote services compared to inpatient rehabilitation, which has made a large technological progress as seen by digital case transfers, new kinds of tele consultations between clinics, technology assisted training concepts, etc.

The ETH RESC – Suva Funding Programme supports holistic research and development projects to optimise the transfer from inpatient rehabilitation towards day-stay and outpatient rehabilitation near the home/workplace after accident-related injuries, with a focus on “Remote Rehabilitation” also known as tele-rehabilitation, location-independent rehabilitation, rehabilitation-at-home, etc.

Proposals shall target the accomplishment of a multidisciplinary pilot project to enter reimbursement negotiations with Suva for the novel approach and address as many of the following four aspects as possible:

1. Rehabilitation Technology: e.g. remote monitoring systems (contactless and non-obtrusive), remote treatment systems (wearable, etc.), telerehabilitation platforms.
2. Big Data: e.g. data interoperability, security, AI applications, value.
3. Organisation: e.g. access points, standards, quality criteria, transdisciplinary
4. Health Economics: e.g. financial and legal modelling, reimbursement mechanisms, cost-benefit analyses, health-technology assessment (HTA)

The grant has been awarded to "RehabCoach – a digital platform that supports remote rehabilitation".

The grant will be used to develop a first proof-​of-concept for remote technology-​supported interventions that will be generalizable to other rehabilitation applications. The interdisciplinary research group, led by RESC members Dr Olivier Lambercy, Senior Scientist at the Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory (RELab) at D-​HEST, and Dr Tobias Kowatsch, Professor for Digital Health Interventions at the University of Zurich (UZH), Director at the School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen (HSG), and Scientific Director of the Centre for Digital Health Interventions (CDHI) at ETH Zurich (D-​MTEC), UZH, and HSG, will start the project in October 2022 and run for three years. Funding for this research calls is supported by RESC’s strategic partner Suva within the framework of ETH’s Rehabilitation Initiative.

Abstract

In this project, we propose RehabCoach, a novel digital platform to support remote rehabilitation. It builds on an interactive smartphone-​based app that can act as an intermediate layer between patients, healthcare professionals and rehabilitation technologies. RehabCoach will help plan unsupervised therapy and set daily goals, send reminders to the user via text messages, support basic conversations via an artificial-​intelligence-based chat function, provide access to information (e.g., media) and collect data via questionnaires (e.g., about the current health status) or metrics related to app use.

Dr Olivier Lambercy on the motivation for the project:

“There is a need for novel rehabilitation solutions to help patients after a neurological injury engage in quality therapy without having to rely on physical access to healthcare facilities. We are developing robotic technologies promoting rehabilitation at the home of patients, but for these to be optimally used and accepted by patients, there is a strong need for a digital platform that could serve as an interface between end-​users, healthcare practitioners and researchers developing the technologies. Based on a personalized interactive mobile phone app, RehabCoach will do just that - motivate and coach patients to engage in remote rehabilitation, while helping us collect essential data on technology usage as well as rehabilitation progress”.

Date published: 01.02.2022
Submission deadline: 01.05.2022
Project timeline: Q4/2022 – Q4/2025

Interdisciplinary project team:

Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory RElab
external pageCentre for Digital Health Interventionscall_made