After a cardiac event like a heart attack or heart surgery, regular heart-healthy exercise is important to reduce the risk of further cardiac events and improve quality of life. That is why patients are offered exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation programmes. In these programmes, patients learn under medical supervision how to safely exercise after the cardiac event. The idea is that, after completion of the programme, patients should then independently continue to regularly exercise during their everyday lives.
But we know that many patients struggle to make heart-healthy exercise a habit during their everyday lives, even after completion of an exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation programme. Digital tools such as smartphone apps could be an option to help patients establish regular heart-healthy exercise in the long term.
aktvplan is a digital tool that has been developed in Austria specifically for this purpose. We are now conducting a study to find out whether aktivplan does in fact help patient to regularly exercise in the long term after an exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation programme.
aktivplan is an exercise scheduling app. At the end of the cardiac rehabilitation programme, the patient and the therapist discuss and agree on a suitable, personalised long-term exercise plan. The therapist then enters this exercise plan in the aktivplan app. The patient can view their personalised plan on the smartphone and check off completed exercise session. They also receive reminders and motivating messages to their smartphone. The therapist can see how many of the planned sessions the patient has completed. Should the patient struggle to complete the planned sessions, the therapist can contact the patient, discuss the reasons and possibly adapt the plan.
In this study, 68 patients will be included at several cardiac rehabilitation centres in Austria. They will be part of the study for 12 months after completing the cardiac rehabilitation programme. They will be randomly divided into two groups. "Randomly" means that the decision is by chance, like tossing a coin. The first group will receive aktivplan for six months after completing the cardiac rehabilitation programme, and then they will not have aktivplan for the remaining six months in the study. The second group will be opposite, so they will not have aktivplan for the first six months and then receive aktivplan for the second six months.
At the beginning, after six months and after 12 months, all patients will complete medical tests (exercise test, ultrasound of the heart, blood tests), measurements of their physical activity in everyday life (wearable sensor) and questionnaires (quality of life, self-confidence, anxiety). We will do statistical tests to compare how physically active and how physically fit the two study groups were at each of these time points. From this, we will be able to see whether aktivplan did in fact help these patients to regularly exercise in the long term.