Thursday, April 25, 2024
4/25/2024
Project Summary/Abstract Health-promoting interventions designed to improve physical and mental fitness can help reduce health care costs and maintain, or even improve, quality of life for older adults. However, getting older adults to adhere to health-promoting exercise interventions remains difficult because such programs are often perceived as being time-consuming, painful, or unenjoyable. The present proposal’s objective is to demonstrate the efficacy of a novel technological exercise intervention program for older adults through a clinical trial. In doing so, we hope to show the program is a health-promoting intervention that can maximize older adults’ independence and quality of life. Preliminary findings have established our approach is feasible; consider that most aging services host bingo games, which is a highly acceptable and familiar game to older adults. In our initial research, bingo, exercise, and health education (Bingocize®) were combined. In that study, adherence rate over 97% and participants significantly improved muscular strength, flexibility, balance, and cardiorespiratory fitness in a sample of older adults (as compared to wait-listed controls). Subsequently, we have developed a novel, technological mobile “app” (e.g., for tablets and phones) that provides a novel opportunity for health professionals to engage older adults in a fun activity that can be modified based on participants’ needs. One- hundred and sixty older adults will participate in a pre/post-intervention design with random assignment to either the experimental or one of three comparison/control groups; each group will play the game in a social setting with other older adults. Participants in the experimental (multimodal) group will use the app to engage in twice-weekly Bingocize® sessions for twelve weeks (i.e., Bingo+Exercise+Health Education); control (unimodal) groups will also use the app for twelve weeks but for either health education-only, exercise-only, or bingo-only. Using this design, the effectiveness of the app will be tested, to see whether it can lead to improvements in functional performance, knowledge of health topics, and aspects of fluid cognitive abilities. In addition, the design will allow for comparisons between multimodal and unimodal (e.g., health education-only, or exercise-only) interventions, the latter of which is much more commonly used in attempts to improve older adult health. We hypothesize that our multimodal intervention using a mobile application will lead to positive physical and mental benefits in historically underserved aging populations, the vast majority of whom are experiencing age-related cognitive decline and a variety of chronic physical ailments. The specific aims of this project are to: (1) identify the benefits of a multimodal, social, app-based health promotion program for cognitive function, (2) identify the benefits for functional performance, health knowledge, and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), and (3) compare/contrast our multimodal intervention to unimodal interventions, which are more common in the literature.
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