Health technology assessment of a homecare device for telemonitoring and telerehabilitation for patients after hand transplantation.

Hand rehabilitation requires continuous and frequent monitoring of the functionality in order to assess therapy and/or refine it. In order to contain costs for the rehabilitation program, a telehomecare rehabilitation system is suitable. The purpose of this paper was to describe the setup and configuration of a homecare device for telemonitoring/telerehabilitation of patients who underwent hand transplant. The telehomecare device allows the assessment of dynamics and kinematics of hand function by integrating dedicated software in two components. The first was a commercial glove, the HumanGlove by Humanware (Pisa, Italy). The second was a set of instruments for the measurement of digit force using an Instrumented Keyboard and an Instrumented Mouse-Like device. The software integrating the devices is composed of two modular components. The first is to drive the devices; the second is for the data-analysis and display. The methodology was validated at the Istituto Superiore di Sanit (the Italian National Institute of Health) in the framework of an Italian National Project, funded by the Ministry of Health.