The Effect of Upper Extremity Telerehabilitation on Balance and Gait in Parkinson's Patients

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a disease that affects the upper extremity functional skills with clinical findings such as bradykinesia, rigidity, and hypokinesia and causes limitations in the daily living activities of the patients. The influence of fine dexterity, reaching, and grasping movements greatly affects the daily living activities of the patients. Medical treatment and surgical approaches are frequently used among the treatment options for PD today. Physiotherapy and rehabilitation approaches for progressive functional loss in PD, together with optimal medical and surgical treatment, form the basis of PD treatment. Recently, it has been stated that intensive and task-specific rehabilitation interventions in the field of physiotherapy and rehabilitation will be more effective than traditional rehabilitation approaches. On the other hand, telerehabilitation approaches, the use of which has increased rapidly due to technological developments in recent times, enables the delivery of rehabilitation services to patients in distant places by using communication technologies. For this purpose, it is highly valuable to implement a task-oriented training (TOT) program based on motor learning-based principles, which consists of intense exercise content, through telerehabilitation. Although there are very few studies investigating the effectiveness of telerehabilitation-based TOT in PD, these studies have shown that upper extremity motor performance, activities of daily living, and quality of life are improved. On the other hand, no study has been found showing the effect of upper extremity TOT applied through telerehabilitation on balance and walking. Therefore, there is a need to investigate the effectiveness of telerehabilitation-based TOT exercises on balance and walking.