Helping the elderly with physical exercise: Development of persuasive mobile intervention sensitive to elderly cognitive decline

摘要

The number of elderly people over 60-year old is expected to reach 2 billion by 2050. With age people experience cognitive decline. While exercises are known to help, one of the age-associated issues is non-adherence. With the increasing adoption of technology by elderly, mobile devices become a good channel to deliver a persuasive solution. In this paper, we discuss the design and evaluation of Adherence Booster (AdBo). AdBo consists of a mobile app that encourages, monitors progress, and guides the elderly through appropriate daily exercises, short-term memory test to continuously measure any cognitive improvement, and a messaging system that reminds the elderly to exercise on a daily basis. AdBo is designed to overcome four identified barriers to adherence which are self-efficacy, outcome expectations, functional decline, and memory decline. The results of a randomized control trial evaluation show that AdBo was successful in boosting the elderly adherence, and elderly friendly exercises have positive effect on short memory performance.!