Tele-rehabilitation: present and future.

SUMMARY: During the last decade we assisted to relevant progress in rehabilitation studies and in technological development. From the combination of these issues rises the tele-rehabilitation--a subfield of telemedicine consisting of a system to control rehabilitation "at distance"--as an actual possibility of application and a promising development in the future. The present paper offers a short review of the state of the art in the field of tele-rehabilitation, with a special focus on upper limb tele-rehabilitation. The experience is also briefly reported of the preliminary application of the H-CAD (home care activity desk) system and the HELLODOC (Healthcare service linking tele-rehabilitation to disabled people and clinicians) tele-rehabilitation service, conducted by the authors within two European projects in the period 2003-2005 and 2005-2007 respectively.