title: Telerehabilitation and emerging virtual reality approaches to stroke rehabilitation.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Stroke is the leading cause of permanent motor disability in the United States, and the rapidly aging population makes finding large-scale treatment solutions to this problem a national priority. Telerehabilitation is an emerging approach that is being used for the effective treatment of multiple diseases, and is beginning to show promise for stroke. The purpose of this review is to identify and highlight the areas of telerehabilitation that require the most research attention.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Although there are many different forms of telerehabilitation approaches being attempted for stroke, the only approach that is currently showing moderate-strong evidence for efficacy is videogame-driven telerehabilitation (VGDT). However, targeted research is still required to determine the feasibility of VGDT: metrics regarding system usability, cost-effectiveness, and data privacy concerns still require major attention.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  VGDT is an emerging approach that shows enormous promise for stroke rehabilitation. Future studies should focus less on developing custom task controllers and therapy games and more on developing innovative, online data acquisition and analytics pipelines, as well as understanding the patient population so that the rehabilitation experience can be better customized.
authors.affiliation: Telemedicine and Virtual Rehabilitation, Burke Medical Research Institute, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, New York, USA.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Putrino
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D000071939:Stroke Rehabilitation; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000379:methods*; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018910:Video Games