It’s well known that regular physical exercise is a significant factor in healthy ageing, but the elderly usually don’t exercise enough. A group of researchers led by Luis Soto, a physiotherapist at the Parc Sanitari Pere Virgili health complex at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Spain, wanted to know why mobile phone applications for exercise available are widely used by younger people but not often and not very effectively by the elderly.
The team’s objective was to establish their usefulness for the online prescription of physical exercise and to determine whether they are adapted to older people’s needs.
Their study was published in the journal Age and Ageing under the title “Mobile applications to prescribe physical exercise in frail older adults: review of the available tools in app stores.”
“Based on the current scientific evidence, we always recommend increasing physical exercise, performing strength exercises and, above all, sitting down less. Doing exercise is obviously better than not doing it, but as professionals, we must be able to optimize and adapt our prescription in terms of intensity, volume, frequency and progression,” Soto explained.
“The completely new aspect of this study lies in the fact that it’s a systematic review that uses the most rigorous methods for searching for, classifying, and analyzing apps, but it’s based on the marketplaces for apps on our phones and not on purely scientific databases and search engines. This means it provides information about the apps that are available to us and which many people we know are probably using,” explained Prof. Marco Inzitari, director of integrated care and research at a large geriatric hospital and a researcher at UOC’s Faculty of Health Sciences.
The study analyzed 15 of the more than 8,000 physical exercise apps available in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store that had been downloaded more than 10,000 times, was aimed at older people and updated in the last three years in English and not exclusive to any specific discipline.
“We found a limited range of apps for this user profile, and we believe that the ones that are available could be better adapted to the needs of frail older people in terms of both prescribing exercise and in their ease of use, thereby empowering them in the process,” the project’s principal investigator noted.
The analysis found no apps that were adapted to users’ cognitive needs. An app aimed at older people, the team said, needs to be simple, intuitive, and focused on their needs. For this reason, they believe it is vital to include their end users in the creation processes, and above all, to involve older people from different backgrounds and with different levels of tech skills. Finally, in their analysis the researchers found that only one of the 15 apps was based on scientific evidence (citations in the PubMed scientific publication search engine).
Over 500 researchers and more than 50 research groups work in the UOC’s seven faculties, its eLearning Research program and its two research centers; it also develops online learning.
“Technology can help us, but it needs to be reviewed quantitatively and qualitatively. The objective of the study was to obtain a qualitative perspective, while also taking into account the scientific evidence, of apps that professionals could use for prescribing exercise for frail older people,” Soto concluded.
