Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Perioperative Medicine
Date Submitted: Aug 3, 2021
Date Accepted: Dec 19, 2021
A cell phone app with multimodality prehabilitation programs for patients awaiting elective surgery: Development and Usability study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Complying with a prehabilitation program is difficult for patients who will undergo surgery due to transportation challenges and a limited time window to intervene. Mobile health (mHealth) using smartphone applications shows the potential to remove barriers and improve the effectiveness of prehabilitation.
Objective:
To develop a cell phone app as a tool for facilitating a multidisciplinary prehabilitation protocol involving blood flow restriction training and sport nutrition supplementation.
Methods:
The app was developed using “Appy PieTM”, a non-coding app development platform. The development process went through three stages: 1) determination of principles and requirements of the app through prehabilitation research team meetings; 2) app prototype design using the Appy PieTM platform; 3) app evaluation by clinicians and exercise and fitness specialists, technical professionals from Appy PieTM, and non-team member users.
Results:
We developed a prototype of the cell phone application with the core focus on a multidisciplinary prehabilitation program with accessory features to improve engagement and adherence to the mHealth intervention as well as research-focused features to evaluate the effects of the program on frailty status, health-related quality of life and anxiety level among patients awaiting elective surgery. The evaluations by research members and random users (n= 8) were consistently positive.
Conclusions:
The present cell phone app provides great potential for improving and evaluating the effectiveness of the multidisciplinary prehabilitation intervention in the format of mobile health in the future.
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© 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.