Can commercial activity monitor be used to prescribe exercise in PR
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Can a commercial activity monitor be used to effectively prescribe exercise and increase physical activity levels in chronic respiratory patients undertaking outpatient pulmonary rehabilitation? - A feasibility study.
IRAS ID
204005
Contact name
Sarah Ward
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 1 days
Research summary
Title: Can a commercial activity monitor be used to effectively prescribe exercise in chronic respiratory patients undergoing outpatient pulmonary rehabilitation? - A feasibility study.
People with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) experience symptoms of breathlessness, muscle weakness, fatigue and episodic flare ups. They have lower levels of physical activity and exercise capacity than those without the condition, increasing their risk of hospitalisation or death.
Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is a universally recognised treatment that is effective in improving patients’ symptom burden, quality of life, and exercise capacity. PR is therefore recommended in national and international guidelines for the management of patients with COPD for all those experiencing physical restrictions to daily life.
PR is a course of supervised exercise and education delivered by a specialist multidisciplinary team. The exercise component includes individually prescribed aerobic training to increase the patients’ exercise capacity. This often takes the form of a walking programme; patients are instructed to walk at a specific speed, previously determined by exercise tests.
Activity monitors that record step counts could be used to help patients monitor exercise training sessions and understand their background physical activity levels; until now this has only been carried out using research style equipment, which gives no feedback to the patient. This study would help determine if it is feasible to use a commercial activity monitor, which offers real time feedback to patients, to prescribe an exercise training programme (i.e. step count per minute of exercise), and whether this can be identified from the data retrieved from the device.
Participants would be those with COPD referred by their clinician for outpatient PR delivered from a hospital site. Participants would undergo the PR process using an activity monitor to guide their exercise training rather than the usual walking speed prescription. The PR pathway takes approximately eight weeks.REC name
North East - Newcastle & North Tyneside 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/NE/0236
Date of REC Opinion
12 Jul 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion