Prehabilitation: Care Challenges and Technological Opportunities

Millions of surgeries are performed in the US annually, and numbers are trending upwards. Traditional rehabilitative interventions are struggling to meet current demands, and researchers have turned to pre-operative interventions, or prehabilitation, to improve patient functions. However, existing literature primarily discusses efficacy or the use of commercial sensing devices, and lacks a clear comprehension of healthcare professionals' (HPs') needs and perspectives. User-centered stakeholder understandings are crucial for a technology's adoption, but prehabilitation literature lacks such understandings. Therefore we conduct semi-structured interviews with 12 prehabilitation healthcare professionals (HPs) to offer descriptions of care challenges, tool usage, and perspectives regarding suitable and effective technologies. These data can assist designers in fostering prehabilitation processes via tailored prehabilitation tools which meet HPs' needs and expectations.