Long Haulers Post COVID-19 and Home-Based Cardio-Respiratory Physiotherapeutic Scheme via Telerehabilitation: A Narrative Review

The long-term consequence of COVID-19 resulting from SARS-COV-2 can have direct and indirect impacts mainly on cardio-respiratory, neuromuscular systems and may affect mental health. These long-term effects may also be experienced by those who have remitted from COVID-19 infection, which is precisely denoted as “long COVID” or “long Haulers”. Such patients can be provided with effective cardio pulmonary therapy with functional rehabilitation and stress management in their remote areas through telerehabilitation. In broad terms, online rehabilitation is less expensive, more practicable, and safer than traditional inpatient or face-to-face rehabilitation. The aim of the study is to find out the current Evidence based literatures from various research protocols of cardio-respiratory related interventions available for long haulers COVID 19 patients via telerehabilitation program with other standard interventions. The present literature search was conducted through PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane library, Google Scholar and PEDro with the following search terms: [“post COVID-19” or “long COVID” or “novel Coronavirus” or “long haulers COVID-19” or “SARS-CoV-2”] and [“Telerehabilitation” or “home based exercise”].In conclusion, this paper shows that Telerehabilitation is a new and interesting medium but, unfortunately there is less evidence based protocols on post covid conditions. Henceforth, we advocate for more research on improving electronic devices to be user friendly. In the future, telerehabilitation will be successful only if practitioners are properly trained and guided. This will lead to more productive rehabilitation outcomes for patients.