When people become ill or experience trauma (physical and psychological), they need support. This support should be focused on optimising their wellbeing as quickly and efficiently as possible so that they can maintain independence, return to education or work (if appropriate), and experience a good quality of life.

Interdisciplinary approaches to rehabilitation, built around a personalised care agenda, can deliver the best outcomes for patients. Yet the health and care system has little flexibility to support rehabilitation outside the clinical environment. Multimorbidity and service design complexity make this difficult to achieve in practice, requiring new approaches and ways of working across the health and care system.

The rapidly evolving ‘transformative technologies’ revolution (e.g. robotics, AI and digital) in health also presents unique opportunities to change the way rehabilitation products and services are delivered to patients. Research in the role of physical activity as a therapy is also expanding our horizons on how movement can bring benefit across the care continuum.

To improve outcomes and address the challenges currently facing rehabilitation, we harness physical activity, AI, digital and non-digital technologies to advance rehabilitation for people with progressive conditions (e.g. chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, multiple sclerosis), recovering conditions (e.g. cancer, stroke) and multimorbidity.

We develop tools to support self-management, help people prepare for and recover more quickly from treatment and promote interdisciplinary approaches to rehabilitation, with a strong focus on ensuring that access to rehabilitation is equitable.