Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Apr 15, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Apr 23, 2019 - Apr 23, 2019
Date Accepted: Apr 29, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Self-administered Auricular Acupressure Integrated with Smartphone Application for Weight Reduction: A Randomized Feasibility Trial.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Obesity is a common global health problem and increases the risk of many chronic illnesses. Given the adverse effects of anti-obesity agents and bariatric surgeries, the exploration of non-invasive and non-pharmacological complementary methods for weight reduction is warranted.
Objective:
The purpose of this study is to determine whether self-administered auricular acupressure (AA) integrated with smartphone application (app) was more effective than using AA alone or the controls for weight reduction.
Methods:
This study is a three-arm randomized waitlist-controlled feasibility trial. Fifty-nine eligible participants recruited from social network platforms were randomly divided into either Group 1 (AA group, n=19), Group 2 (AA plus smartphone app, n=19), or Group 3 (waitlist control, n=21). Six ear acupoints for weight reduction were chosen. The smartphone app could send out daily messages to the subjects to remind them to perform self-pressing on the six ear acupoints. A ‘date picker’ of the eight-week treatment course was used to enable the users to input the compliance of pressing and the number of bowel movement daily instead of using the booklet for recordings. The app also served as a reminder for the subjects regarding the dates for returning to the centre for acupoint changing and assessments.Treatment was delivered two times a week, for eight weeks by a trained therapist. Evaluator blinding was adopted for assessment. Generalized estimating equations were used to examine the interactions amongst the groups before and after intervention.
Results:
Subjects in Group 2 expressed that the smartphone app was useful (7.41 out of 10). The most popular features were the daily reminders for performing self-pressing (88.2%), the ear diagram indicating the locations and functions of the six ear points (70.6%) and ear pressing method demonstrated in the video scripts (47.1%). Nearly 90% of the participants completed the eight-week intervention, with a high satisfaction towards the overall arrangement (8.37 out of 10). The subjects in Group 1 and 2 achieved better therapeutic effects in terms of body weight, body mass index, waist circumference and hip circumference and perceived more fullness before meals than the waitlist controls. Although no significant differences in the pairwise comparisons between the two groups were detected, the decrease in body weight, BMI, body fat, visceral fat rating and leptin level and increase in adiponectin level were notable in Group 2 before and after the intervention.
Conclusions:
The high compliance rate and high satisfaction towards the trial arrangement indicate that AA can be used to achieve weight reduction and applied in future large-scale studies. AA integrated with the smartphone app has a more notable effect than using AA alone for weight reduction. Larger sample size should be considered in future trials to determine the causal relationship between treatment and effect. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT03442712
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.