JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Cognitive frailty is a co-existence of both physical frailty and cognitive impairment and an at-risk state for many adverse health outcomes, including dementia, dependency, and mortality. Moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) is protective against the progression of cognitive frailty. Physical inactivity is still common in older people. Brisk walking is a feasible form of physical activity for older people to practise to enhance their MVPA. M-health employing persuasive technology has been successful to increase their levels of physical activity. However, its feasibility and effects on older people with cognitive frailty are unclear.

Objective:

The aims of this study were to 1) identify issues relating to the feasibility of the intervention and the trial, and 2) examine the effects of the intervention on cognitive function, physical frailty, walking, and MVPA.

Methods:

An open-label, two-parallel-groups, randomized controlled trial (RCT) was employed. The eligibility criteria were 1) ≥ 60 years, 2) having cognitive frailty, and 3) having physical inactivity. In the intervention group, participants received both conventional behavioural change and m-health (i.e., smartphone-assisted programme using Samsung Health and WhatsApp) interventions. In the control group, participants received conventional behavioural change intervention only. The outcomes included cognitive function, frailty, walking, and MVPA. Permuted block randomization in a ratio of 1:1 was used. Issue of feasibility was described in terms of subject recruitment, retention, participation and compliance. Wilcoxon sign-rank test was used to test the within-group effects in both groups separately. The level of significance was 0.05.

Results:

We recruited 99 subjects and 33 eligible subjects were randomized into either intervention (n=16) or control (n=17) group. Their median age was 7.10 years (IQR=9.0) and the majority of them were female (n=28, 84.8%). The recruitment rate was 33.3%, the subject retention rate was 90.1%, the attendance rate of all face-to-face sessions was 100%. The majority of smartphone messages were read the participants within 30 minutes (42.1%). Actigraph (87.9%) and smartphone (93.5%) wearing compliances were good. After the interventions, cognitive function improvement was significant in both the intervention (P=0.003) and control (P=0.009) groups. Frailty reduction (P=0.005), walking-time increase (P=0.026), step-count increase (P=0.017), brisk-walking time increase (P=0.009), peak-cadence increase (P=0.003), and MVPA time increase (P=0.016) were significant only in the intervention group.

Conclusions:

It is feasible to implement this m-health intervention in older people with cognitive impairment. The m-health intervention is effective at enhancing compliance with the brisk-walking training programme delivered by conventional behavioural change interventions. It is also effective at increasing MVPA time to an extent sufficient to yield clinical benefits (i.e., a reduction in cognitive frailty). This study recommends using the m-health intervention to promote MVPA to the extent that older people with cognitive frailty find tolerable. Further studies should employ a full-powered and blinded RCT to warrant these effects. Clinical Trial: This pilot randomized controlled trial has been registered with the Hong Kong University Clinical Trials Registry (HKUCTR-2283).