Digital Telerehabilitation in Functional Motor Disorders

Functional movement disorders (FMDs) are part of a wide spectrum of functional neurological disorders characterized by abnormal movements (gait, dystonia, and tremor), which are clinical incongruent with movement disorders caused by neurological disease and are significantly altered by distraction or nonphysiologically manoeuvres. FMDs have an incidence ranging from 4 to 12 per 100.000 population per year and high prevalence (15-20%) in patients accessing neurological clinics. They are a high disabling condition characterized by long-term disability, poor quality of life and economic impact on health and social care systems. Indeed, these patients experience disability and distress equivalent to those suffering from degenerative neurological disease, such as Parkinson's Disease. Despite this, FMDs have been widely misunderstood, receiving little public and academic attention.

Diagnostic clinical criteria for FMDs are based on positive signs that support certain integrity of the pathway from an anatomical and physiological perspective: specific maneuvers can make apparent the function that seems to be lost or impaired. Despite the clinical burden, the exact pathophysiological mechanisms underlying FMDs have not been elucidated and so FMDs' management remain largely unknown. The hallmarks of FMDs patients distinguishing them from those with organic movement disorders is that their movements have features usually associated with voluntary movement. Still, patients report them as involuntary and not under their control. Why movements that appear voluntary because altered by distraction are experienced as involuntary (or outside the patient's control) is a matter of debate.

In addition to motor complaints, non-motor symptoms (NMSs) such as fatigue, pain, anxiety, depression have been increasingly recognized as important contributors producing levels of disability over and above those caused by the abnormal movement. Within this perspective should be considered the rehabilitation of patients with FMDs, to reduce disability and improve Health-related Quality of Life (QoL) in the context of a multidisciplinary team. To do that, there are limits that must be overcome: rehabilitation approaches are few and limited because of empirical approaches mainly referring to clinical practice without following evidence-based consensus recommendations, most existing studies are uncontrolled case series or crossover studies and innovations to improve access to specialist rehabilitation treatment by qualified professionals (i.e., tele/remote health an wearable technology) and to monitor patients in the long-term have been seldom explored in patients with FMDs.

Digital medicine, a new field based on "using digital tools to upgrade the practice of medicine to one that is high-definition and far more individualized", led the introduction of a new path for generating a new form of healthcare through the medical data acquisition by the individual, in real time, in a real-world environment, enabling site-less, digital clinical trials where suitable participants are identified, consented, and enrolled remotely. The next phase of this will greatly impact clinicians across disciplines including rehabilitation. In fact, in the last few years, telerehabilitation (a telemedicine subfield consisting of a system to control rehabilitation at a distance) has been progressively developed allowing to overcome the barrier of distance and time (mainly in communities far from urban centers), to cut down the cost and labor of accessing healthcare, and to provide access to patients having temporary and permanent disabilities for accurate diagnosis and rehabilitation prescription and delivery.

Digital telerehabilitation combined the advantages of telerehabilitation with the possibility to use digital tools (i.e., wearable sensors, digital platform) in monitoring functions and activities in real-time and in the real-world environment. Digital Telemedicine platforms offer new opportunities for diagnosis, monitoring, treatment, and management of diseases allowing the acquisition, transmission, and storage of clinical information through electronic devices and communication technologies to provide and support remote health care, including rehabilitation. The use of digital technologies applied to rehabilitation through telemedicine systems (telerehabilitation) represents one of the main fronts of development in neurological rehabilitation as it offers the potential to extend specific rehabilitation paths from the hospital phase to the home phase allowing, thanks to the involvement of highly qualified personnel, better management of diseases and their clinical, social and economic outcomes.

The increasing development and availability of portable and wearable technologies are rapidly expanding the field of technology-based objective measures (TOMs) in neurological disorders. However, substantial challenges remain in (1) recognizing TOMs relevant to patients and clinicians to provide accurate, objective, and real-time assessment of gait and activity in a real-world setting and (2) their integration into telerehabilitation systems towards a digital rehabilitation transition. It is crucial in FMDs because of the clinical complexity of patients who require highly qualified personnel, adapting rehabilitation programs over time according to the patients' improvements, and long-term monitoring without impacting health care costs. Besides the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has prevented patients from accessing rehabilitation in hospital settings, the restricted presence of qualified centers for the rehabilitation of patients with FMDs emphasizes the need to create specific digital telerehabilitation pathways by qualified staff that can reach patients who would not have access to such rehabilitative treatment. However, pilot studies for phase III trials - which are comparative randomized trials designed to provide preliminary evidence on the clinical efficacy of a drug or intervention (also commonly known as "feasibility" studies), must be designed to assess the safety of treatment or interventions; to assess recruitment potential; to assess the feasibility of international collaboration or coordination for multicenter trials; to increase clinical experience with the study medication or intervention for the phase III trials . They are the best way to assess feasibility of a large, expensive full-scale study, and in fact are an almost essential pre-requisite.

The primary aim of the study is to implement and assess the feasibility of the steps that need to take place as part of the main confirmatory study on comparing the effects of a digital telerehabilitation program including TOMs on motor symptoms severity and duration in patients with FMDs. The secondary aim is then to compare the training effects on non-motor symptoms (pain, fatigue, anxiety and depression), the self-perception of clinical change and Health-Related Quality of Life, and health care costs.