Background: Self-help eHealth interventions provide automated support to change health behaviors without any further human assistance. The main advantage of self-help eHealth interventions is that they have the potential to lower the workload of health care professionals. However, one disadvantage is that they generally have a lower uptake.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: People with a low socioeconomic position (SEP) are less likely to benefit from eHealth interventions, exacerbating social health inequalities. Professionals developing eHealth interventions for this group face numerous challenges. A comprehensive guide to support these professionals in their work could mitigate these inequalities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Communicating risk information and offering lifestyle advice are important goals in cardiac rehabilitation. However, the most effective way and the most effective source to communicate this information are not yet known. Therefore, we examined the effect of source (cardiologist, physiotherapist) and framing (gain, loss) of brief lifestyle advice on patients' intention-to-change-lifestyle.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Financial incentives are a promising tool to help people increase their physical activity, but they are expensive to provide. Deposit contracts are a type of financial incentive in which participants pledge their own money. However, low uptake is a crucial obstacle to the large-scale implementation of deposit contracts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: eHealth interventions can improve the health outcomes of people with a low socioeconomic position (SEP) by promoting healthy lifestyle behaviours. However, developing and implementing these interventions among the target group can be challenging for professionals. To facilitate the uptake of effective interventions, this study aimed to identify the barriers and facilitators anticipated or experienced by professionals in the development, reach, adherence, implementation and evaluation phases of eHealth interventions for people with a low SEP.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: eHealth is a useful tool to deliver lifestyle interventions for patients with cardiometabolic diseases. However, there are inconsistent findings about whether these eHealth interventions should be supported by a human professional, or whether self-help interventions are equally effective.
Methods: Databases were searched between January 1995 and October 2021 for randomized controlled trials on cardiometabolic diseases (cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes mellitus) and eHealth lifestyle interventions.
Background: Lifestyle support is essential in preventing and treating cardiovascular diseases (CVD), and eHealth may be an easy and affordable solution to provide this support. However, CVD patients vary in their ability and interest to use eHealth. This study investigates demographic characteristics determining CVD patients' online and offline lifestyle support preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Gamification and deposit contracts (a financial incentive in which participants pledge their own money) can enhance effectiveness of mobile behavior change interventions. However, to assess their potential for improving population health, research should investigate implementation of gamified deposit contracts outside the research setting. Therefore, we analyzed data from StepBet, a smartphone application originally developed by WayBetter, Inc.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Financial incentive interventions for improving physical activity have proven to be effective but costly. Deposit contracts (in which participants pledge their own money) could be an affordable alternative. In addition, deposit contracts may have superior effects by exploiting the power of loss aversion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Promoting health behaviors and preventing chronic diseases through a healthy lifestyle among those with a low socioeconomic status (SES) remain major challenges. eHealth interventions are a promising approach to change unhealthy behaviors in this target group.
Objective: This review aims to identify key components, barriers, and facilitators in the development, reach, use, evaluation, and implementation of eHealth lifestyle interventions for people with a low SES.
Low socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with a higher prevalence of unhealthy lifestyles compared to a high SES. Health interventions that promote a healthy lifestyle, like eHealth solutions, face limited adoption in low SES groups. To improve the adoption of eHealth interventions, their alignment with the target group's attitudes is crucial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) pose a significant health threat and reduce both people's life expectancy and quality of life. Healthy living is a key component in the effective prevention and treatment of CVD. However, health care professionals (HCPs) experience difficulties in supporting lifestyle changes among their patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A promising new approach to support lifestyle changes in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the use of financial incentives. Although financial incentives have proven to be effective, their implementation remains controversial, and ethical objections have been raised. It is unknown whether health care professionals (HCPs) involved in CVD care find it acceptable to provide financial incentives to patients with CVD as support for lifestyle change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Healthy living is key in the prevention and rehabilitation of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Yet, supporting and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is exceptionally difficult and people differ in their needs regarding optimal support for healthy lifestyle interventions.
Objective: The goals of this study were threefold: to uncover stakeholders' needs and preferences, to translate these to core values, and develop eHealth technology based on these core values.
We compared the perception and neural processing of respiratory sensations between 20 COPD patients and 20 healthy controls by means of respiratory-related evoked potentials (RREP) in the electroencephalogram (EEG). RREPs were induced by short inspiratory occlusions while 129-channel EEG was measured. COPD patients rated the occlusions as more intense and unpleasant ('s < 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnxiety is a highly prevalent psychological comorbidity in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and has detrimental effects on pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) outcomes. It has been suggested that disease-specific fears could play an even more important role in COPD patients' disease progression. However, little is known about how different disease-specific fears impact COPD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychological factors such as negative affect have been demonstrated to impact course and treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, little is known about the respective impact of social factors. In several other chronic diseases, loneliness has been shown to predict morbidity, but little is known about its impact on COPD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRespiratory muscle dysfunction is common and contributes to dyspnea and exercise limitation in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Improving dynamic function of respiratory muscles during exercise might help to reduce symptoms and improve exercise capacity. Areas covered: The aims of this review are to 1) summarize physiological mechanisms linking respiratory muscle dysfunction to dyspnea and exercise limitation; 2) provide an overview of available therapeutic approaches to better maintain load-capacity balance of respiratory muscles during exercise; and 3) to summarize current knowledge on potential mechanisms explaining effects of interventions aimed at optimizing dynamic respiratory muscle function with a special focus on inspiratory muscle training.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe transition dyspnea index (TDI) is among the most widely used instruments in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients to measure changes in dyspnea over time. In its original version it is used as guideline for a structured interview to assess the impact of daily activities on dyspnea in the three subdomains: functional impairment, magnitude of task, and magnitude of effort. However, the TDI is sometimes used as a self-administered paper-and-pencil questionnaire.
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