Empathic communities: reaching out across the Web
interactions
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Socialbilty
The Virtual Community: Finding Commection in a Computerized World
The Virtual Community: Finding Commection in a Computerized World
Patients' online communities experiences of emergent Swedish self-help on the internet
Communities and technologies
A framework for understanding trust factors in web-based health advice
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Engineering a virtual community for breast cancer patients
International Journal of Web Based Communities
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Rehabilitation for people with a long-term progressive neurological disease like Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is essential to obtain information on the disease and adapt to it. From a practitioners' point of view, it is important that the rehabilitation for MS should encourage patients' autonomy and improve their quality of life. The rehabilitation for MS patients are traditionally been face-to-face courses and personal physiotherapy, but the internet has enabled some forms of online rehabilitation. Because of the novelty of rehabilitation courses on the internet, studies on rehabilitation are still few and important also from a scientific point of view. The study at hand is a longitudinal case study on an internet-based rehabilitation course. The focus of the research is the concept of virtual community and especially sociability, which existed among the participants during the course. The results show that internet rehabilitation courses may suit MS patients. Peer support and the exchange of experiences were deemed by the participants to be the most important outcome of the online course. The trust level between the participants was very high. In contrast to several other studies, the present study shows that MS patients prefer knowing each other to anonymity on the internet rehabilitation courses.