A brief review of the development of telerehabilitation and its application in patients of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis

Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) is a three-dimensional spinal deformity and characterized by progressive development during growth, and eventually to a curvature of the spine greater than 10 degrees on the posteroanterior radiograph. AIS usually does not present symptoms in early age, which makes the diagnosis and treatment of these patients difficult. Thus, a follow-up observation of all suspicious AIS patients becomes very important to monitor the progression of spinal cord deformity. Telerehabilitation is a new type of rehabilitation, which links the professional physiotherapists and the patients through telecommunication and information technology. Telerehabilitation can be synchronous (through any device real-time connection between patients and therapists), asynchronous (computer-based intervention for remote monitoring by the physiotherapists and offline adjustments), or a combination of both. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused medical health care system chaos and affected seriously the ongoing disease management in many countries. Telerehabilitation can reduce the spreading risk of COVID-19, the cost of face-to-face rehabilitation service, the pressure on the staff, and the financial burden on the patients. In this review, we briefly describe the development of telerehabilitation, its current status and related technologies, and its application in clinical practice of AIS. In addition, we discussed the limitations of the current telerehabilitation and its future prospection. We believe that telerehabilitation could provide high quality rehabilitation service to the patients, thus becoming the mainstream of rehabilitation to the population of AIS.