Creating a foundation for the empowerment of active older adults with the help of digital healthcare interventions for back-pain management

Abstract

Evidence-based practice showed that empowering people with digital health devices is exceedingly important and the recent pandemic has just catalyzed this tendency. Hereby, we are interested to see how using health devices could improve people’s healthy behavior and help specialists to tailor a better and more personalized intervention for back-pain management.

We performed end-user testing and the results are focused on the acceptance of the monitoring system.

onclusions reflect how wearing a device to detect the correctness of one’s physical activity (e.g., hard manual working, lifting weights, twisting, etc.) is connected to the worker’s ability to see the effects of physical activity, as a way to improve their lifting habits and prevent back-pain at work. This is a perceived benefit with an impact on user acceptance and adoption intention.

The results could be used to scale-up the product, including a video-based application to reflect the feedback. Our purpose is directed towards aiding current and future generations to engage in healthy behaviors and encourage preventive care, also emphasizing the potential of device usage to detect or prevent medical risks before they cause health problems.

The real "touchstone" for healthcare professionals and researchers is to help people understand and improve their unsafe behaviors (in this case, unsafe lifting) before pain or injury occurs. Only after having done so, the smart solutions can be used as powerful tools for better health at the workplace.