Motivation, market and European perspective

Abstract

Stroke is a disease with very high socio-economic impact. In average, the healthcare expenditure cost for Strokes across different countries in Europe and the USA is 3 % of their entire healthcare expenditure. This includes inpatient treatment cost, outpatient hospital visits and long-term rehabilitation and care. Analysis showed that costs of long-term care have increased from 13 to 49 % of overall costs in average in recent years. Therefore, there is an urgent need for devising an effective long-term care and rehabilitation strategy for Stroke patients, which involves patients actively in the process while minimising costly human intervention. Later, we describe main motivation behind pursuing research and development work on rehabilitation of stroke patients using an automated remote rehabilitation system by blending advances of ICT and practical clinical knowledge in order to empower the patients and their immediate care takers for effective application of the rehabilitation in home settings. The discussion further describes the state-of-the-art in research and development, signals similar systems already available on the market, concluding with identifi cation of the potential impact of systems like StrokeBack and similar ones in European and worldwide perspectives.