Telerehabilitation for Children with NeuroDevelopmental Disorders during Covid-19 Pandemic: A Scoping Review

Children with neurodevelopmental disorders across the world receive pediatric rehabilitation services. The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic challenged the rehabilitation community providing services for these children. The aim of the study was to outline the number, variety and characteristics of telerehabilitation services for children with neurodevelopmental disorders in the era of Covid-19.

To identify relevant literature, the scoping review method was used. Our results were presented according to PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. The nine-step updated scoping review method by Peters et al. including some pre-search, search and post-search steps was conducted. A structured search of three databases of the Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus was conducted for the studies published during 1 January 2020 to 12 December 2022. The extracted literature was reviewed in two steps by two independent reviewers.

Twenty-seven articles met the inclusion criteria. Most of the studies were conducted in the United States. Services provided by telerehabilitation were mostly tele-intervention (n=19, 70.37%) followed by tele-evaluation (n=5, 18.52%). More than half of the studies used tele-conferencing for providing their services (n=15, 55.56%).

Although the variety of telerehabilitation service deliveries seems to have increased and even the number of participants in the studies has increased, still considering the rapid spread of the pandemic, the studies seem not to be adequately organized in terms of methods.