A Pedometer-based Intervention With and Without Email Counselling in General Practice

Charles University, Czech Republic

Status: Completed

Conditions: Physical Activity; General Practice; Primary Care

Treatments: Behavioral: pedometer-only; Behavioral: pedometer-plus-email

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03135561

Pedometer-plus-email

Details and patient eligibility

About

A two-arm parallel randomised controlled trial comparing pedometer-based intervention with and without email counselling in a primary care setting. Physically inactive patients from four general practices will be randomised to the pedometer-plus-email group or to the pedometer-alone group. All patients will be instructed to gradually increase the daily number of steps to at least 10,000. Patients in the pedometer-plus-email group will receive 8 counselling emails based on behavioural techniques. The primary outcome will be change in average daily steps measured during 7-day period at baseline and at 12 weeks.

Enrollment: 37 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• physically inactive, i.e. takes less than 8,000 steps per day at baseline
• registered at the participating general practice,
• over 18 years of age,
• regular email user, and willing to use email for the purpose of the study,
• has a home computer with access to the Internet.

Exclusion criteria

• medical or psychiatric condition which the general practitioner considers as inappropriate for participating in the intervention (e.g., terminal illness, psychotic illness, chronic disorders or diseases that seriously influence the ability to be physically active, dementia or significant cognitive impairment, unable to move about independently),
• medical, personal of family condition which the general practitioner considers temporarily affects mean daily step count at baseline (e.g., acute illness, holiday or business trip),
• pregnant woman,
• currently engaging in regular sports or exercise (at least twice a week),
• failure to upload pedometer data to a website at baseline assessment,
• failure to give informed consent with the study.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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37 participants in 2 patient groups

pedometer-plus-email

Experimental group

Treatment:

Behavioral: pedometer-plus-email

pedometer-only

Active Comparator group

Treatment:

Behavioral: pedometer-only