Physical Telerehabilitation in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis with Significant Mobility Impairment

People with multiple sclerosis (MS) may develop severe disability over the time. Physical therapy including regular exercise helps patients with severe disability to maintain muscle strength, reduce disease symptoms, and improve quality of life. However, physical therapy programs at clinical settings require constant travel, which may limit access of patients with mobility disability to these services on continuous basis.

Technology can allow patients with mobility disability exercise at home under supervision of their rehabilitation team. However, it is unclear how effective this approach is. We will conduct a clinical trial in which half of the randomly chosen participants with mobility impairment due to MS will be using this new technology to exercise at home and the other half will exercise at home without this new technology. After 6 months, we will compare disease severity in these two groups.

We hope that our study will demonstrate that the patients who were helped by the new technology to exercise at home will have better fitness, less symptoms, and better quality of life. If we demonstrate this in our project, other patients with significant mobility disability will be able to take advantage of this technology. This approach can be extended to people with different diseases causing mobility impairment and it can be used not only for physical but also for cognitive and occupational rehabilitation.