An Attempt to Approach Mobile Cervical Rehabilitation to Elder Patients

Abstract

[eng] RehbeCa is a platform for mobile cervical rehabilitation that emerged with the goal to provide a treatment of nonspecific neck pain at home (or elsewhere). The platform includes a mobile application addressed to patients with an exergame that integrates a head-tracker interface, which allows the monitoring and analysis of the fulfillment of the neck therapeutic exercises prescribed by physiotherapists. Among all the potential patients of the mobile application, there are elder patients. Addressing age as a significant barrier to digital technology access, special consideration should be given to elderly users in the design and evaluation of any mHealth application. We present a user study with 36 participants to evaluate the usability of the RehbeCa mobile application, including 11 elder adults. The results are presented in terms of the System Usability Scale (SUS). The mobile application obtained a mean SUS score of 84, considered as Excellent in the adjective rating scale. We have found a significant difference between adult and elder adult, and no significant difference by sex.