Research Article Massage Therapy of the Back Using a Real-Time Haptic-Enhanced Telerehabilitation System Cristina Ram´ ırez-Fern´ andez, 1 Victoria Meza-Kubo, 2 Elo´ ısa Garc´ ıa-Canseco, 2 Alberto L. Mor´ an, 2 Oliver Pabloff, 2 David Bonilla, 2 and Nirvana Green 2 1 Instituto Tecnol´ ogico de Ensenada, Ensenada, BC, Mexico 2 Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Aut´ onoma de Baja California, Ensenada, BC, Mexico Correspondence should be addressed to Cristina Ram´ ırez-Fern´ andez; cramirezf@gmail.com Received 29 July 2017; Accepted 15 November 2017; Published 31 December 2017 Academic Editor: Pino Caballero-Gil Copyright © 2017 Cristina Ram´ ırez-Fern´ andez et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We present the usability evaluation of a haptic-enhanced telerehabilitation system for massage therapy of the back using the Vybe haptic gaming pad and the gesture sensor LEAP motion controller. e evaluated system includes features that allow for (i) administering online therapy programs, (ii) providing self-adjustable and safety treatment of back massages using a virtual environment, and (iii) saving and replaying massage sessions according to a patient’s therapy program. e usability evaluation with 25 older adults and 10 specialists suggests that the haptic telerehabilitation system is perceived with high usability and pleasurable user experience, while providing personalized intensity of haptic therapy in a supervised, real-time, and secure way to treat the patient. Moreover, the specialists totally agree that the system design features, such as save and play, and delimiting therapy zones are the most important for back massage therapy, while the features of regulating feedback intensity and providing/receiving a massage remotely are also important. Finally, based on their comments, five design insights aiming at improving the current version of the system were generated. 1. Introduction Due to a combination of demographic changes and the lack of resources in the field of public health and technology im- provement, the development of new rehabilitative practices seems mandatory to build sustainable models for re- habilitation from the clinical, organizational, and economic perspectives [1]. In recent years, haptic feedback has proven to enhance user experience in telerehabilitation [2]. However, current telerehabilitation systems have yet to exploit the richness of haptic modality within its content. e lack of haptic methods that provide real-time rehabilitation in a su- pervised and remote way inhibits the attention of patients that require massage treatment of the back. Massage therapy has become one of the most popular complementary and alter- native medical (CAM) therapies for back pain, the condition for which CAM therapies are most commonly used [3]. A massage is defined as “a mechanical manipulation of body tissues with rhythmical pressure and stroking for the purpose of promoting health and wellbeing” [4]. Despite the avail- ability of novel mechanical support tools for back massage intervention, for example, [5–7], massage therapy is still provided in a traditional way, where both the patient and the therapist need to be in the same place [8]. In [9], we introduced a novel real-time haptic-enhanced telerehabilitation system for massage therapy that consists of a web application and a local virtual environment (VE) in which the interaction is performed using the Leap Motion Controller (LMC) gesture sensor [10] and the Vybe haptic gaming pad [11]. e system, called GoodVybesConnect, al- lows the therapy input parameters to be individualized and calibrated according to the patient’s characteristics. It also allows the execution of the therapy to be dependent on the therapist’s hand movement in the VE, so that multimodal feedback (i.e., visual, audible, and vibrotactile feedback) is sent to patients in real time depending on the availability of the Hindawi Mobile Information Systems Volume 2017, Article ID 5253613, 10 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/5253613