Congratulations Eline te Braake on publishing our scoping review on The State of the Art of eHealth Self-Management Interventions for People With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. (see the full open access publication here).
What is the paper about?
Eline did a tremendous job analysing the current literature on eHealth self-management for peple with COPD. What I think is super cool was the detailed distinctions between:
- What is the “e” in eHealth:
Functionality, modality, technology readiness level (TRL), and eHealth development details of the used technologies. - What is “Health” in eHealth Technologies for Self-Management:
Eline used the the positive health paradigm to identify which dimensions of health are addressed in the self-management interventions described in the literature. - What or who is the “Self” in Self-Management:
Distinguishing between the intended population for the intervention (as stated in the intervention description), the included population (as stated in the inclusion and exclusion criteria), and the final actual study population (as stated in the demographics of study participants). - What is “Management” in Self-Management:
Which self-management processes and behavior change techniques were identified within the different eHealth technologies.
What did we find?
We showed that current eHealth technologies tend to address the physical aspect of COPD self-management, which means that many dimensions of the positive health paradigm (participation and mental well-being, meaningfulness and quality of life) and self-management processes (psychological resources, spiritual resources, community resources) are barely or not addressed at all in current eHealth interventions for COPD self-management. However, as COPD is a chronic disease that affects all aspects of one’s life, the underrepresented dimensions and processes might be very important to include.
Our review also showcases another gap, namely, the effect of inclusion criteria that leads to a subgroup of people with COPD included in eHealth technology studies. Therefore, one should be cautious when interpreting results, as this may give a distorted view of the COPD population within these studies. These gaps demonstrate the need for more inclusive research and design of eHealth self-management interventions for people with COPD, focusing on multiple dimensions of the health paradigm.
