Telerehabilitation and exercise for chronic conditions: development of a disease-agnostic telerehabilitation intervention for people with chronic conditions

Background: Chronic conditions, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis, are a leading cause of death and disability worldwide and pose significant challenges for our healthcare service. Rehabilitation has been identified as an integral aspect of chronic condition management, promoting self-management of patients’ health and well-being, increasing their physical function, and improving quality of life. Telerehabilitation, the delivery of rehabilitation remotely via telecommunication technologies, has the potential to increase service accessibility by overcoming the traditional barriers to in-person rehabilitation. Telerehabilitation offers significant advantages for chronic condition management, particularly in rural and remote locations. Its scalability allows healthcare providers to extend service delivery to these populations without the need for expansion of infrastructure, facilitating patient uptake and engagement with rehabilitation programmes. Despite the diversity in the underlying medical conditions, rehabilitation programmes for various chronic conditions are remarkably similar, typically including progressive exercise training and education. Therefore, recent evidence supports the development of disease-agnostic group rehabilitation programmes which encompass a wide range of chronic conditions, rather than condition-specific programmes. However, previous telerehabilitation research has focused on condition-specific rehabilitation programme delivery, such as cardiac telerehabilitation solely for cardiac populations, or pulmonary rehabilitation for respiratory cohorts only. Therefore, there is uncertainty regarding the optimal content and delivery of telerehabilitation programmes for various chronic conditions and the feasibility of a disease-agnostic telerehabilitation programme for mixed-condition groups.