Technology-Supported Rehabilitation: Advancing Patient-Centered Care and Recovery

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid development of digital health technologies in recent years has significantly expanded the possibilities of technology-supported rehabilitation, enabling more objective, personalized, and patient-centered approaches to care and recovery. Advances in sensing and robotics technologies, computation, and data analysis now allow clinicians and researchers to quantify movement quality, functional performance, and recovery trajectories with a level of precision that was previously difficult to achieve in clinical practice. 

Technology-supported rehabilitation encompasses a wide range of tools designed to assess and support motor recovery, functional independence, and long-term health outcomes. These tools facilitate both the rehabilitation and the objective evaluation of key rehabilitation outcomes, such as movement smoothness, coordination, symmetry, and task execution quality, which are central to monitoring patient progress and guiding therapeutic decision-making. By integrating these technologies into rehabilitation pathways, clinicians can enhance both the accuracy of assessments and the individualization of interventions. 

A broad spectrum of technological solutions will be addressed in this Special Issue, ranging from low-cost and widely accessible devices (i.e., smartwatches and smartphone-based applications) to advanced systems including wearable multi-sensor platforms, robotics, and intelligent rehabilitation environments. These technologies support diverse modes of use, including supervised assessments during standardized clinical tasks as well as continuous or semi-continuous monitoring during activities of daily living, thereby extending rehabilitation beyond traditional clinical settings.  

Particular attention will be given to methods that support personalized rehabilitation strategies, promote patient engagement, and facilitate the translation of quantitative metrics into meaningful clinical outcomes. 

By adopting an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective, this Special Issue aims to bring together clinicians, engineers, and researchers to address the methodological, technological, and clinical challenges of this rapidly evolving field, ultimately contributing to the advancement of patient-centered rehabilitation and recovery through technology-supported solutions. 

In this Special Issue, original research articles, reviews and perspectives are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of existing assessment tools in rehabilitation;
• Validation studies of existing assessment tools;
• Psychometric studies measuring the psychometric characteristics of assessment tools;
• Comparative studies of different assessment tools measuring the same area;
• Cross-sectional studies for cultural adaptation of assessment tools in specific countries.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Bruno Bonnechère
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.