Pervasive prehabilitation programme

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Pervasive prehabilitation programme

• IRAS ID

  207501

• Contact name

  Omer Aziz

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Manchester

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 3 months, 8 days

• Research summary

  ‘Prehabilitation’ aims to improve a patient’s activity levels to get them ‘fit for surgery’. There is evidence that this may be better than traditional ‘rehabilitation, which focuses on activity after surgery. “Prehabilitation” is labour-intensive to administer because it involves home or clinic visits.

  Technological advances have increased the number of wearable ‘lifestyle’ devices that help measure activity levels, sleep, and fitness as part of their normal day (pervasively). These devices allow daily goal setting and give feedback (encouragement) to help achieve them. Using pervasive technologies could offer the potential to deliver prehabilitation on a large scale.

  There are two components:

  1. Patient perception study (n=15):
  Patients currently attending follow-up clinics will be asked for their feedback on the device and also try it on. It should be noted that this will not result in any deviation from their clinical management.

  2. Pilot Study (n=5):
  Healthy volunteers will be asked to wear the Fitbit and evaluate a prehabilitation programme. This programme will have 3 components: Exercise, Nutrition and Psychological.

  a. Exercise: Volunteers will be set a target of 10.000 steps/day through their Fitbit devices. Volunteers will be asked to complete a walking test each day and complete a table of the results.
  
  b. Nutrition: Dietary advice will be given to volunteers in addition to lifestyle advice to optimize exercise and reduce unhealthy habits.

  c. Psychological: Encouragement to achieve the targets each day and positive feedback regarding daily distance walked and calories burnt.

  It should be noted that these are not patients and the fitness tracker will be used for their intended CE marked use, and not as a medical device. There is no direct benefit for the individual research participants. However, the success of this study will lead to larger studies evaluating the benefits of technology in delivering efficient prehabilitation.

• REC name

  Yorkshire & The Humber - South Yorkshire Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  16/YH/0249

• Date of REC Opinion

  8 Jun 2016

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion