Keep Exercising & Stay Steady: Development and Feasibility of a Digital Health Intervention to Encourage Exercise Maintenance After Fall Prevention Exercise Programmes End.

Summary

Falls and broken bones are a common health problem faced by older adults. Worldwide, one third of adults aged over 65 years old, and half of adults aged over 80 years, fall each year. One in five falls in older adults result in hospitalisation and one in twenty cause broken bones. Each year, 300,000 older adults break a bone following a fall which costs the UK £4.4billion in healthcare costs. Broken hip bones are the most serious outcome of a fall. One in twenty older adults will die and one in five need care assisted living following a hip fracture.

Muscles and bones become weaker after 50 years of age which increases an older adults' risk of falling and breaking a bone. Falls prevention programmes that include muscle strength and balance exercise improves physical function and helps to prevent falls and broken bones in older adults. However, many older adults stop doing exercise and become less physically active after falls prevention programmes end. Gains in balance and muscle strength are lost and falls risk increase if people don't keep exercising. More people are reaching older ages and becoming less active. Therefore, this problem will worsen unless healthcare practices become better at preventing falls and broken bones in older adults.

The research ambition is to create a technology supported home exercise programme that encourages older adults to keep exercising after falls prevention programmes end. This will help to prevent future falls and broken bones which will allow more older adults to continue living independently. The home exercise programme will benefit older adults everyday lives by helping them to maintain good physical health and improve their ability to perform daily tasks without the fear of falling.

Older people at risk of falls, clinicians, and public members will be invited to form a research advisory group. The group will work with the research team to create the home exercise programme and research plan and advise how best to communicate the research to the public. Diversity within the research advisory group will be important to help shape the research to meet the diverse views and needs of the many different people affected by falls and broken bones. We will target the research to help older adults with the greatest health needs. Older adults living in deprived neighbourhoods have the greatest risk of falling and dying following a broken bone. The home exercise programme will be researched in older adults attending falls prevention programmes in the most deprived regions of England. This will help us to explore whether the programme could encourage the continuation of exercise in older adults who need it most.

Conditions

• Fall Patients

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Keep Exercising and Stay Steady

Digital Health, home exercise intervention containing a digital NHS approved falls prevention exercise App (Keep On Keep Up), fitness watches, telephone and/or social media communication, and behavior change techniques. Currently (date, 13 May 2024) the intervention has not been developed with the community of practice group. Further details of the phase 1 and phase 2 interventions will be provided after the community of practice events.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Orthopaedic Research UK

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• HealthWorks Newcastle Upon Tyne

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• KOKU Health CIC

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• The University of Manchester

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Glasgow Caledonian University

  collaborator OTHER

• Northumbria University

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

60 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2024-06-20

Primary Completion

2026-05-19

Completion

2026-05-19

Countries

• United Kingdom

Study Locations