JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Rehabilitation frequently extends beyond supervised clinical settings, creating demand for scalable digital tools to support structured follow-up. We propose a novel open-source telerehabilitation platform.

Objective:

We describe the iterative, user-centred development of an open-source rehabilitation follow-up platform, and report findings from an initial formative usability evaluation with patients, health care professionals, and additional end users.

Methods:

The platform was developed through repeated cycles of stakeholder engagement, prototyping, and evaluation within the rehabilitation department of Insel Group, University Bern. A formative usability evaluation was conducted with 24 participants (8 health care professionals, 9 patients, 7 additional participants; mean age 41.1 years, SD 12.9) using a task-based protocol. Perceived usability was assessed with the System Usability Scale (scored 0--100) and the Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire (scored 1--7; higher is better). Open-ended written responses were processed by one researcher using rapid content analysis.

Results:

A web-based telerehabilitation platform that enables therapists to manage patient caseloads, assign and track personalised rehabilitation interventions, and monitor patient progress through Fitbit activity data, and rehabilitation plan adherence. It supports multi-clinic workflows with role-based access, REDCap patient importing, automated background processing via Celery, and multilingual content. Its mean System Usability Scale score was 82.8 (SD 14.1), placing the platform in the ``excellent'' usability range. Mean Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire overall score was 6.02 (SD 0.77), with all three subscales scoring above 5.7. Most participants (20/24, 83\%) rated the task set as easy or very easy; no participant rated any task as difficult. Among health care professionals, 7/8 (88\%) reported intention to use the platform in practice. Qualitative themes highlighted the value of rehabilitation plan overview, structured intervention scheduling, and progress tracking.

Conclusions:

The platform, released as open-source (MIT license), demonstrated promising perceived usability across both patient and clinician user groups in a formative evaluation. these findings provide preliminary support for the perceived usability of the platform and justify further evaluation in real-world rehabilitation settings. Future work will evaluate deployment in real-world outpatient settings and assess clinical effectiveness.