2024

Tiitinen, Sanni; Korniloff, Katariina; Riquelme, Inmaculada; Lällä, Kaisa

Background: The development of digital technologies has offered new ways to provide rehabilitation services, and the COVID-19 pandemic at the latest accelerated the introduction of digitality into rehabilitation. However, there is not a shared understanding of the terminology related to digitality within the field of rehabilitation. Objectives: The paper aims at providing a data-driven, broad understanding about the variety of meanings for digital rehabilitation within the professional field of rehabilitation in Finland. Data: The data consisted of three group interviews conducted in Finland online via Zoom in September 2021 as part of a larger international research project focusing on digital rehabilitation. The interviewees were students, teachers, and practitioners of rehabilitation (mainly from the fields of physiotherapy and occupational therapy), and they had some experience on digital rehabilitation. The groups included 10 interviewees in total. Methodology: We utilized social constructionism as our theoretical framework and reflexive thematic analysis as our method with which we approached the data inductively. Results: Based on our qualitative analysis, we described the following four themes: (1) digital rehabilitation as an inescapable part of today’s digital world, (2) digital rehabilitation as fundamentally the same than before digitalization, (3) digital rehabilitation as a mix of established methods and new prospects, and (4) digital rehabilitation as a constantly developing and radically new thing. Thus, very different and potentially tensioned meanings were constructed for digital rehabilitation during the group interviews. Conclusions: The results highlight the importance of open and multi-perspective discussion about the different meanings of digital rehabilitation. This is essential so that scholars and practitioners will not end up talking about digital rehabilitation and implicitly linking it to different meanings.