Reaching People With Disabilities in Underserved Areas Through Digital Interventions: Systematic Review

Background: People with disabilities need rehabilitation interventions to improve their physical functioning, mental status, and quality of life. Many rehabilitation interventions can be delivered electronically ("digitally") via telehealth systems. For people with disabilities in underserved areas, electronically delivered rehabilitation interventions may be the only feasible service available for them.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the current status of digital interventions for people with disabilities in remote and underserved areas.

Methods: A systematic review was conducted on this topic. Keyword searches in multiple databases (PubMed, CINAHL, and Inspec) were performed to collect articles published in this field. The obtained articles were selected based on our selection criteria. Of the 198 identified articles, 16 duplicates were removed. After a review of the titles and abstracts of the remaining articles, 165 were determined to be irrelevant to this study and were therefore removed. The full texts of the remaining 17 articles were reviewed, and 6 of these articles were removed as being irrelevant to this study. The 11 articles remaining were discussed and summarized by 2 reviewers.

Results: These 11 studies cover a few types of disabilities, such as developmental disabilities and mobility impairments as well as several types of disability-causing disorders such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, and facio-scapulo-humeral muscular dystrophy. Most of these studies were small-scale case studies and relatively larger-scale cohort studies; the project evaluation methods were mainly pre-post comparison, questionnaires, and interviews. A few studies also performed objective assessment of functional improvement. The intervention technology was mainly videoconferencing. Moreover, 10 of these studies were for people with disabilities in rural areas and 1 was for people in urban communities.

Conclusions: A small number of small-scale studies have been conducted on digital interventions for people with disabilities in underserved areas. Although the results reported in these studies were mostly positive, they are not sufficient to prove the effectiveness of telehealth-based digital intervention in improving the situation among people with disabilities because of the small sample sizes and lack of randomized controlled trials.