As we've seen, the field of clinical rehabilitation is rooted in the premise that carefully planned and delivered therapeutic intervention enhances patient outcomes.  Medical rehabilitation exists because there is evidence - unfortunately mostly heuristic - that there is merit to intervention by professionals trained in the art and science of rehabilitative service provision. These professionals receive years of training. The figure below represents a block diagram of the type of conceptual model that is part of the training within each of the allied health professions.

From an engineering perspective, there is a need for better understanding - scientific inquiry - for any of these boxes. The book Enabling America especially targets two classic areas as being of special priority: assessment and therapy.  Assessment is an integral part of many aspects of the block diagram, but of special note are the feedback branches. Therapy is a form of interventions (though interventions is a broader term in that some interventions are performed by the individual or his/her caregiver). These terms will re-emerge throughout this class, and effective implementation remains a scientific and engineering challenge.

When viewed within the context of a "continuum of care," the reality is that most rehabilitation care is by way of "outpatient" therapy, delivered as a finite series of bolus interventions.  Since the patient or client resides outside of the clinic (e.g., home, work), typically there is no sampling of the subsequent dynamic temporal response from such interventions.  Hence innovative approaches, such as the use of telerehabilitation tools, carry special promise in that they can break down access bariers, thus enabling new clinical rehabilitative science paradigms.

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