Equity in Health is a pillar of the Health Literacy for All slogan. WHO states that “health inequities are differences in health status or in the distribution of health resources between different population groups”. Fighting inequalities in Health constitutes a societal challenge. Patient empowerment is also paramount, with citizen-centred healthcare systems tailored to patients’ needs and experiences, fostering autonomy in personal healthcare management. 

The Com@Rehab project¹ gathers the expertise of Linguistics, Technology, and Medicine, contributing to the rehabilitation of post-COVID19 patients in home environments and promoting equity in Health. This research enhances a technological solution by introducing the Digital Communication Module (MCD Rehab), which bridges the communicative gap between patients, caregivers and healthcare providers while improving the patients’ interaction with the technology. MCD Rehab’s goal is to foster health and technological literacy. 

Our methodology encompasses scenarios of real-life activities supported by Virtual Reality (VR) that, together with several communicative scenarios, lead to the development of linguistically precise motor rehabilitation exercises. The verbal communication data analysis includes the: collection of an oral corpus containing instructions for upper-limb exercises; adaptation of the instructions into messages; integration into VR-based gaming. The visual or voice messages are displayed via an interaction menu to guide and motivate the patient, according to the level of difficulty prescribed in the rehabilitation process. 

In this talk, we address the activities related to self-care (ICF). To test the message creation and its impact on the execution of the exercises, we defined a set of variables, corresponding to the type of patient, lesion and exercise to be conducted to recover the mobility of the affected upper limb. A visual or voice-based instruction, such as /brushing teeth/, is associated with each variable combination and supported by a conceptual organisation of the self-care subdomain. MCD Rehab’s framework, anchored in Terminology, comprises corpus processing and analysis plus ontologies, enabling interoperability.  

Com@Rehab widens the rehabilitation scenarios and contributes to lower healthcare costs, additionally providing patients with an active voice and guidance throughout the process.

¹ This project, which won the Santander/NOVA University Collaborative Research Award in 2020, is thoroughly described in https://clunl.fcsh.unl.pt/en/investigacao/projetos-curso/comrehab/.