Stroke is the primary cause of permanent motor disability in the United States, and due to the rapidly aging population finding large-scale treatment solutions to this problem is a national priority. Telerehabilitation is an emerging approach that is being used for the effective treatment of multiple diseases, and is beginning to show potential for stroke. The purpose of this review is to identify and highlight the areas of telerehabilitation that require the most research attention. Although there are many different forms of telerehabilitation approaches being attempted for stroke, the only approach that is currently showing moderate-strong evidence for efficacy is videogame-driven telerehabilitation (VGDT). However, targeted research is still required to determine the feasibility of VGDT: metrics regarding system usability, cost-effectiveness, and data privacy concerns still require major attention.
VGDT is an emerging approach that exhibits tremendous potential for stroke rehabilitation. Future studies should focus less on developing custom task controllers and therapy games and more on developing innovative, online data acquisition and analytics pipelines, as well as understanding the patient population so that the rehabilitation experience can be better customized.