Usability in social telerehabilitation systems for elderly users

Healthy ageing has been conceptualized from a number of different perspectives, both biomedical and social, and encompasses well-being, capacity for independent activity, meaningful involvement, supportive environments and positive attitudes. There is a general consensus that technology can reduce the decline of functions in elderly persons and support their rehabilitation activity, helping them to cope with daily life in a way more similar to their original lifestyles. On this purpose, we report on a literature review (from January 1998 to June 2016), which is part of the Latvian national science program VPP INOSOCTEREHI, a new three-year multidisciplinary project in the field of social telerehabilitation focused on social inclusion. The review was conducted in the Medline database that contains over 22 million records and is a subset both of PubMed and Embase databases. We decided to limit our review to Medline since its records are from about 5600 mainly from US journals and this would provide a certain homogeneity. However, in the near future, we plan to improve our investigation including others databases, such as Embase, that contains over 29 million records from journals from at least 90 countries, and SAGE that encloses a wide range of records about computer-based applications.