Whelan Maxine E, Denton Francesca, Bourne Claire L A, Kingsnorth Andrew P, Sherar Lauren B, Orme Mark W, Esliger Dale W
Centre for Intelligent Healthcare, Coventry University, Coventry, UK.
National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK.
BMC Public Health. 2021 Jan 12;21(1):130. doi: 10.1186/s12889-020-09740-z.
Mobile health technologies have advanced to now allow monitoring of the acute physiological responses to lifestyle behaviours. Our aim was to explore how people engaged with real-time feedback on their physical activity and glucose levels over several weeks.
Semi-structured interviews with 26 participants (61.5% female, 56.6 years) at moderate-to-high risk of developing type 2 diabetes were conducted. Interviews were completed after participants took part in an intervention comprising a flash glucose monitor (Freestyle Libre) and a physical activity monitor (Fitbit Charge 2). Purposive sampling ensured representation of ages, genders and group allocations.
Inductive thematic analysis revealed how individuals intuitively used, interpreted and acted on feedback from wearable technologies. Six key themes emerged: triggers of engagement with the technologies, links between behaviour and health, lack of confidence, changes to movement behaviours, changes to diet and barriers to lifestyle behaviour change.
Our findings demonstrate that accessing behavioural and physiological feedback can increase self-awareness of how lifestyle impacts short-term health. Some participants noticed a link between the feedback presented by the two devices and changed their behaviour but many did not. Training and educational support, as well as efforts to optimize how feedback is presented to users, are needed to sustain engagement and behaviour change. Extensions of this work to involve people with diabetes are also warranted to explore whether behavioural and physiological feedback in parallel can encourage better diabetes self-management.
ISRCTN Registry, ISRCTN17545949 , 12/05/2017, prospectively registered.
移动健康技术已发展到如今能够监测对生活方式行为的急性生理反应。我们的目的是探究人们在数周时间里如何参与关于其身体活动和血糖水平的实时反馈。
对26名患2型糖尿病风险为中到高的参与者（61.5%为女性，年龄56.6岁）进行了半结构化访谈。在参与者参加了一项包括闪光血糖监测仪（Freestyle Libre）和身体活动监测仪（Fitbit Charge 2）的干预后完成访谈。目的抽样确保了年龄、性别和组分配的代表性。
归纳主题分析揭示了个体如何直观地使用、解释可穿戴技术的反馈并据此采取行动。出现了六个关键主题：对技术的参与触发因素、行为与健康之间的联系、缺乏信心、运动行为的改变、饮食的改变以及生活方式行为改变的障碍。
我们的研究结果表明，获取行为和生理反馈可提高对生活方式如何影响短期健康的自我意识。一些参与者注意到了两种设备提供的反馈之间的联系并改变了他们的行为，但许多人没有。需要培训和教育支持，以及努力优化向用户呈现反馈的方式，以维持参与度和行为改变。将这项工作扩展到糖尿病患者也很有必要，以探索并行的行为和生理反馈是否能促进更好的糖尿病自我管理。
ISRCTN注册库，ISRCTN17545949，2017年5月12日，前瞻性注册。
