Everyone around the world is aware well of the importance of daily exercise for people with chronic illness. But when you ask what type and duration and how intense the daily exercise should be, it seems hard to answer quickly.
So does the clinical doctors. They offer medical prescription with their expertise in medical knowledge and clinical experience. But they do not feel that easy when it comes to exercise prescription.
Here brings a Smart System for Exercise Prescription lending the doctors a big hand by generating the scientific, personalized and optimal exercise prescription in an automatic and quick way.
"We had many visits to community health centers and talks to the clinical doctors and GPs (general practitioners). And we were increasingly aware of that information technology could do something to offer a help," said MA Zuchang who led the project and is a researcher at the Institute of Intelligent Machines within the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS).
"It seems that it’s a little bit tricky for GPs to offer exercise prescription. They are doctors. They know well about medical diagnosis and treatment. But how about the sports science?” According investigation by MA and his team, knowing little about sports science makes it difficult for GPs to offer optimal exercise prescription.
And the fact even gets more complicated. As most older people may suffer from not one chronic disease. Someone may have heart disease and high blood pressure which makes the problem more intractable.
"We should do something to help." When they saw the needs, MA and his team decided to develop a smart system using their years of experience in sports health equipment developing which requires a combination of sports health theory and information technology.
After trial and error, they finally developed the Smart Exercise Prescription System which is based on a cloud platform.
The system demonstrates its smartness by generating an exercise prescription that includes guidelines for what type, duration and intensity and frequency the daily exercise should be. Moreover, the exercise prescription would be different from one person to another, which is a result from advanced processing of complex data that is gathered from some other physical examination regarding physical condition and chronic diseases.
For a following investigation, the team launched a survey at a community health center which had offered 1,770 exercise prescriptions in the last year, among which two hundred and five prescription receivers participated in a clinical trial.
One year later, the team was happy to see a good result that a great improvement was shown at heart rate, subendocardial myocardial activity rate which is a good teller of cardiac feeding capacity and obesity index factors (like weight, BMI, body fat rate).
The team organized their work of system developing and clinical trials and got it published in Journal of medical internet research.
Smart System Teaching You to Take Exercise Optimally to Keep Fit (Image by SUN Ting)
Contact:
ZHAO Weiwei
Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (http://english.hf.cas.cn/)
Email: annyzhao@ipp.ac.cn