Study of Benefits and Limitation of Tele-rehabilitation in communication disorders

Introduction: Tele-rehabilitation is defined by the ASHAi as the application of the telecommunications technology to deliver professional services at a distance by linking clinician to client, or clinician to clinician for assessment, intervention, or consulting in many communication disorders and is deemed an appropriate model of service delivery for SLPsii. The primary goal of using Tele-rehabilitation is to overcome barriers related to access of services. Despite of this explanation, there are some Benefits and Limitations in this technology, so the purpose of this study is investigating of Advantages and Disadvantages of Tele-rehabilitation.Methods: This paper reviewed recent studies about benefits and limitations of Tele-rehabilitation in communication disorders. These papers were extracted from Science Direct, Pro quest, Pub med Data Bases.Results: Review Different studies showed that, Improving and increasing services previously not available due to physical distance or lack of clinicians in the area, reducing travel to receive services and therefore decreasing fatigue, easing of scheduling and less disruption to the client s work schedules or those of working family members and saving time of traveling to health care facilities are some benefits of Tele-rehabilitation .In spite of these advantages, there are certain limitations. Clinician is not able to have direct physical contact with the client to provide cues, reinforcement and tactile stimulation. It s also difficult to make changes to the environment during Tele-rehabilitation intervention and make eye contact with the client. This method also can limit the ability to engage in real-word transfer activities.Conclusion: this study showed that Tele-rehabilitation as a kind of service delivery method, has some benefits and limitations. The clinicians regarding to client s ability such as hearing acuity, cognitive, cultural consideration, speech intelligibility, Access to technical Resource and his distance can use this technology.

Keywords:

Tele-rehabilitation , Communication disorder , Speech Therapy