JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Cardiac rehabilitation adherence is low. Social media has been used to improve motivation and cardiac rehabilitation completion, but the authors did not find Facebook interventions for these purposes in the literature.

Objective:

The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of the Chat intervention for affecting change in exercise motivation and need satisfaction, and adherence to cardiac rehabilitation.

Methods:

The Behavioral Regulation in Exercise Questionnaire-3 and Psychological Need Satisfaction for Exercise were used to measure motivation and need satisfaction (competence, autonomy, relatedness) before and after the Chat intervention. To support need satisfaction, the intervention included educational posts, supportive posts, and interaction with peers. The feasibility measures included recruitment, engagement, and acceptability. Groups were compared using ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis tests. Paired t-tests were used to assess motivation and need satisfaction change, and Pearson or Spearman correlations for continuous variables.

Results:

Thirty-two participants were lost to follow-up and twenty two were included in analysis. Higher motivation at intake [0.53(0.14, 0.78), p=0.010], and change in need satisfaction-autonomy [0.61(0.09, 0.87), p=0.024] were associated with more completed sessions. No between group differences were found. Engagement included “likes” (n=210) and “hits” (n=157). For acceptability, mean scores on a 1 (not at all)-5 (quite a bit) Likert for feeling supported and in touch with providers were 4.6 and 4.4 respectively.

Conclusions:

Acceptability of the Facebook group was high. Those with greater motivation at intake completed more sessions, indicating its importance in cardiac rehabilitation completion. Despite challenges with recruitment and engagement, important lessons were learned. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov # NCT02971813