THüKo-App

Promoting health competence with a digital application: Adaptation and evaluation of the evidence based exercise program THüKo for patients with osteoarthritis.

01/07/2017 to 30/06/2020

Telemedicine and ehealth have a large potential to address a challenge the German health system
is currently facing: patients should be empowered to take over more responsibility for their own
health 1. This is especially true for lifestyle interventions such as health related physical activity on
a regular basis. Health competence is a crucial prerequisite for the initiation and maintenance of
physical activity in general and exercise therapy for chronic diseases in particular. In this regard,
digital applications can help to take over responsibility and to foster the required health
competence, if they consider patients’ needs and prerequisites and provide feedback. Evidence
based implementations (i.e., cognitive interfaces) providing these two features (individualization
and feedback) are scarce in the domain of physical activity. Therefore, the current project set out to
develop a cognitive interface allowing for individualization and feedback with respect to physical
activity (PA). Parts of an evidence based program for exercise therapy in osteoarthritis will be
implemented in an ehealth application. Empirical tests are planned for (a) the feedback procedure,
(b) the usability of the application among different groups of the target population, and (c) - most
importantly - the comparison of a conventional book-based exercise introduction versus the newly
developed ehealth application regarding their effectiveness to improve participant’s health
competence. This project will provide insides that can be used for the design of cognitive interfaces
in OA as well as in other disease-related ehealth interventions.