Tracking Physical Activity for Chronic Pain Management Among Older Adults in Detroit

University of Michigan

Status: Completed

Conditions: Chronic Pain

Treatments: Behavioral: STEPS Intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03285958

HUM00133021

Details and patient eligibility

About

Wearable, commercially-available physical activity monitors are being increasingly incorporated into chronic pain self-management interventions as a tool to help patients set goals and to tailor intervention content based on patient progress. Yet older adults from resource-challenged communities may face significant barriers to using these monitors and reporting activity data. Our pilot study will focus on wearable monitor use among older adults in Detroit with chronic musculoskeletal pain, testing the feasibility and validity of various technology-based strategies for reporting daily step count data. The study will also assess whether six weeks of monitor use is associated with improvements in functioning, relative to a control group.

Enrollment: 57 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 60+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Age > 60 years
• Ambulatory with or without assistive device
• Community living
• Have a SMS-capable cell phone
• Internet access (via smartphone, in-home or elsewhere);
• Self-reported chronic musculoskeletal pain (pain in muscles or joints for > 3 months)
• >4 (0-10 scale) average pain level over last week
• >1 day/previous 30 when pain made it difficult to do usual activities
• Ability to travel to study location in Detroit for a one-time session

Exclusion criteria

• Serious acute illness or hospitalization in last month
• Planned surgery in next month
• Severe cognitive impairment

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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57 participants in 2 patient groups

STEPS Intervention Group

Experimental group

Description:

Participants will receive a wearable physical activity monitor and will be asked to report their daily step count in 3 different ways (2 weeks each of SMS text messages, Interactive Voice Response calls (IVR), automatic upload) during the 6-week study period.

Treatment:

Behavioral: STEPS Intervention

STEPS Control Group

No Intervention group

Description:

Participants in this group will not receive a wearable physical activity monitor and will not be asked to report their step count.