Digital Telerehabilitation After Total Knee Arthroplasty: A Narrative Review of Clinical Outcomes, Patient Experience, Safety, and Resource Use.

PURPOSE: Digital telerehabilitation has become an increasingly employed form of rehabilitation therapy to support patients who have undergone total knee arthroplasty (TKA). However, various platforms differ in content, monitoring, feedback, and clinician involvement. This review summarizes recent evidence on smartphone-based and digitally mediated telerehabilitation. Functional recovery was emphasized as the primary outcome. RECENT FINDINGS: A search across PubMed, EMBASE, and CINAHL Complete was conducted from January 1st, 2019, to April 30th, 2026, resulting in eighteen postoperative TKA studies being included in the synthesis. Digital telerehabilitation generally produced functional recovery comparable to conventional physical therapy or usual care, with reported study specific advantages in range of motion, gait, strength, activity, or patient-reported function. Despite adherence and patient-experience findings often being favorable, the measures were inconsistent across studies. Additionally, pain outcomes were heterogeneous, and safety, including complications and readmissions, were limited due to incomplete reporting and low event counts. No included study provided a full economic evaluation. However, several studies reported reduced travel burden, out-of-pocket costs, or rehabilitation costs. SUMMARY: This review integrates evidence across functional recovery, adherence, pain, satisfaction and engagement, complications and readmissions, while treating cost and resource-use findings as contextual evidence. Digital telerehabilitation appears to be a feasible adjunct or alternative for selected patients after TKA, with the clearest support for comparable functional recovery and less standardized evidence across secondary and contextual outcomes.