Human Reliability Assessment of Home-Based Rehabilitation

In recent years, the number of patients who have chosen a home-based rehabilitation service has increased significantly. However, no formal human reliability analysis of such service has yet been published. In this article, we aim to develop a novel failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) based assessment method to analyze human reliability qualitatively and quantitatively for home-based rehabilitation. The software, hardware, environment, liveware, and central liveware model is first used to analyze the potential failures from four interface systems when rehabilitation measures are implemented at home. Various uncertainties in the experts’ assessment information of potential failures are expressed by means of the concept of hesitant 2-tuple linguistic term sets. The score functions are then suggested to determine the risk ranking of failure modes determined in FMEA. Finally, the practical effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a case study, and the results show that the proposed method is useful, effective, and flexible for human reliability assessment. In addition, the results could help the health care providers to identify the high-risk failure modes during the design and implementation of the rehabilitation plan at home and take appropriate measures in advance to look for alternatives and ensure the safety and effectiveness of the home-base rehabilitation.