Table 3 Description of identified telerehabilitation assessment domains

Social aspects

Major life areas: Technologies are seen as opportunities to identify similar user communities and share experiences among peers [49]. Effect on psychological distress [50], stress management, fatigue [50, 51], knowledge of treatment and chronic disease [52,53,54,55]. Encouraging but varied effects on self-efficacy [53, 56, 57]. Effects on behavioral changes in PA, diet, medication adherence, and smoking [53, 57,58,59,60,61,62]. Individual: Ten reviews examine the acceptability of the intervention [63, 64] mainly to the patient as an end user [58, 65, 66], and 15 reviews study satisfaction [58, 67, 68]. Facilitators and individual barriers are also studied [45, 69]. Communication: Evaluation of the usability of technologies during the development process [25, 46, 58, 63, 70]. Need for targeted technology [65] and stimulation of user engagement, motivation and involvement over time [68, 71, 72], and the quality of patient-caregiver interaction [64, 65, 68, 73]

Clinical effectiveness

Health outcomes: Benefits and unanticipated negative effects of telerehabilitation interventions compared to standard interventions (usual care). Outcomes include postintervention mortality [74, 75], clinical results (blood lipids, blood pressure, hemoglobin A1c, weight and BMI) [20, 47, 53, 58, 76], quality of life [51, 56, 66, 68], anxiety, depression [51, 58, 75, 77,78,79,80], and physical functions (exercise capacity, exercise tolerance); presented in the short [47, 54, 81], medium and/or long term [82, 83]. Patient satisfaction: Willingness to reuse or recommend the technology [51, 55]. Comparative accuracy of a replacement technology: More specific or safer technological intervention than an older or comparable technological intervention (with more features, feedback, educational messages, or combinations of technological tools) [20, 65, 81]

Health problems and current use of technology

Target condition: Differences in the effectiveness of the intervention according to the various targeted pathologies, possible differences from one pathology to another [50, 65]. Example of type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes [20, 76]. Utilization: differences in use between countries or a lack of education in low-income countries [66, 84]. Identification of the applicability and acceptability of telerehabilitation in primary care, general practice and hospital settings [85]. Other: Only one study focused on evaluating the actors involved in the design of the technology (i.e., a team of IT developers) [86]

Description and technical characteristics of technology

Features of the technology: General information (name, type of device, language, etc.) [48, 67, 86], purpose of using the technology (e.g., to promote behavioral change) [45, 58, 79, 87], technical characteristics (ergonomics, functionalities, interoperability) [88,89,90,91]. Investments and tools required to use the technology: Type of operating system and its availability [49, 71, 84, 86, 92]; the brand and relevance of technological tools [23, 25, 59]. Training and information needed to utilize the technology: Protocols, educational materials, recommendations, and documents developed to make the intervention appropriate for the target population [48, 65, 67, 70, 92,93,94]. Need to establish feasibility, accessibility and usability studies [89]

Costs and economic evaluation

Unit costs: Related to the unit costs of the resources used (e.g., technology acquisition costs or the cost of specific actions) [49, 65, 70, 84, 86, 95, 96]. Outcomes: Health cost outcomes by type of telerehabilitation intervention [97], compared to a control group [68], to prevent, predict or minimize exacerbation [98]. Cost-effectiveness: Intervention that can be cost-effective under certain conditions [56, 95]. Despite being minimally studied, "urgent" need to performed controlled and homogeneous trials [99]

Organizational aspects

Process: Monitor care outcome processes, such as maintenance of the behavioral effects of the intervention [65], clinic attendance, the effectiveness of the chronic disease surveillance system or the compliance of tools used to improve clinic attendance (e.g., SMS reminders) [95]. Interest in having a multidisciplinary team trained in motivational feedback [100]; fund technology-oriented studies and encourage proposals from interdisciplinary groups of researchers [65]. Structure: The effects of the implementation of interventions on hospital admissions, the use of health resources [72, 101, 102], clinical workload and workflow, and dependence on technology for work [103]. Management: Interest in proposing multiple models of patient management (e.g., integrating alternative models) based on evidence, responding to the needs and profile of patients [68, 77]. Take into account the intentions of future caregivers to integrate technological tools into their practice [65, 89]

Legal aspects

End-user: Identify the various target populations [53, 69, 77, 104] and those that are poorly studied [48, 53] to carefully examine the possibility of generalizing new modalities of intervention and their potential dissemination. Privacy of the patient and authorization and safety: Describe procedures to ensure the security and storage of private data [64] and identify whether problems occur in the private sphere [67]. Legal regulation of novel/experimental techniques: Adapt the development of new mobile applications to regulations (e.g., medical devices) [89]. Regulation of the market: Identify whether reimbursement of intervention systems is possible and by whom [65]

Ethical analysis

Principal questions about the ethical aspects of technology: Spreading the use of technologies (e.g., ethical challenges of privacy and data security)[25]

Safety

Technology-dependent safety risks: Identify potential problems with the reliability and validity of information entered into the technology by the patient or caregiver; identify the number of adverse effects of interventions in patients [63]. Use- or user-dependent safety risks: Identify potential complications that may arise due to certain functionalities (e.g., misinterpretation of information sent) [65]