Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Aug 23, 2020
Date Accepted: Dec 23, 2020
The Use of Telehealth Technology to Support Health Coaching for Seniors: A Literature Review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Health coaching is an intervention process for driving behavior change through goal-setting, education, encouragement and feedback on health-related behaviors. Telehealth systems that include health coaching and remote monitoring are making inroads in managing chronic conditions and may be especially suited for elderly populations.
Objective:
This literature review aimed to investigate the current status of health coaching interventions incorporating telehealth technology and the associated effectiveness of this intervention to deliver health care with an emphasis on seniors (aged 65 and older).
Methods:
A literature review was conducted to identify the research conducted on health coaching combined with remote monitoring for delivering health care to seniors. The Ovid MEDLINE and CINAHL databases were queried using a combination of relevant search terms (including middle aged, aged, older adult, elderly, health coaching, and wellness coaching). The search retrieved 196 papers published from January 2010 to September 2019 in English. Following a systematic review process, the titles and abstracts of the papers retrieved were screened for applicability to health coaching for seniors to define a subset for further review. Papers were excluded if the studied population did not include seniors. The full text of the 42 papers in this subset were then reviewed, and 13 papers related to health coaching combined with remote monitoring for seniors were included in this review.
Results:
Of the 13 studies reviewed, ten found coaching supported by telehealth technology to provide effective outcomes. Effectiveness outcomes assessed in the studies included hospital admissions/readmissions, mortality, hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) level, body weight, blood pressure, physical activity level, fatigue, quality of life, and user acceptance of the coaching program and technology.
Conclusions:
Telehealth systems that include health coaching have been implemented in senior populations as a viable intervention method for managing chronic conditions with mixed results. Health coaching combined with telehealth may be an effective solution for providing health care to older adults. However, health coaching is predominantly performed by human coaches with limited use of technology to augment or replace the human coach. The opportunity exists to expand health coaching to include automated coaching.
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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.