Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 3, 2022
Date Accepted: Dec 19, 2023
Effectiveness of eHealth interventions promoting physical activity in children and adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
eHealth technologies has been postulated as a feasible, acceptable and possibly effective tool to promote physical activity (PA) among children and adolescents, however a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the effects of eHealth interventions on PA and sedentary behaviours is lacking.
Objective:
A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted including experimental studies reporting the effects of eHealth interventions on PA parameters (count/min, steps/day, light PA and MVPA) and sedentary behaviour parameters (screen-time and sedentary time) in children and adolescents.
Methods:
PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science databases were searched for original studies analysing the effect of eHealth interventions on PA and sedentary parameters in children and adolescents. The Hartung-Knapp-Sidik-Jonkman random effects method was used to compute standardized mean differences (SMD) with their respective 95% confidence intervals (CIs).
Results:
Overall, our data support that eHealth interventions aimed at increasing PA and decreasing time spent in sedentary behaviours in children do not have a significant effect on either increasing the PA they perform or decreasing the time spent on sedentary behaviours.
Conclusions:
Despite being limited in terms of statistical significance; our results may have an important scientific impact as they highlight that fast-paced advancements in eHealth technologies lack robust supporting evidence. These findings highlight the need for collaboration between researchers and eHealth technology developers to ingrain the benefits of eHealth into traditional interventions. Clinical Trial: PROSPERO ID: CRD42020211020
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
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.