What is it about?
We conducted a study to check if simple mobile-phone text messages can be used to promote exercise in older adults. We had 39 participants who all received an exercise booklet showing them what exercises they should do. 18 participants received an additional 60 encouraging text messages over 12 weeks. After these 12 weeks we checked which group exercised more. We found that those who received the text messages exercised about 1.2 more per week compared to the participants who only received the exercise booklet. However, after we stopped sending text messages both groups exercised similarly often.
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Why is it important?
It is important to promote exercise in older adults because they can benefit from it (health effect). Further, there are not many studies using technology to promote exercise in developing counties, where the levels of exercise are decreasing rapidly.
Perspectives
This study was interesting because we could show that simple text messages are very powerful in supporting older adults to exercise regularly. Many of the participants who received the text messages told us that this was a great help to continue exercising.
Dr Andre Matthias Müller
National University of Singapore
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Text Messaging for Exercise Promotion in Older Adults From an Upper-Middle-Income Country: Randomized Controlled Trial, Journal of Medical Internet Research, January 2016, JMIR Publications Inc.,
DOI: 10.2196/jmir.5235.
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