A Novel Mobile App (“CareFit”) to Support Informal Caregivers to Undertake Regular Physical Activity From Home During and Beyond COVID-19 Restrictions: Co-design and Prototype Development Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Informal caregivers, or carers (unpaid family members and friends), are instrumental to millions worldwide for the ongoing delivery of health and well-being needs. The risk of crisis points (eg, hospitalizations) for caregivers increases with the absence of physical activity. The COVID-19 pandemic is highly likely to have increased the risk of crisis points for caregivers by increasing the amount of time spent indoors due to shielding and lockdown restrictions. Thus, accessible evidence-based tools to facilitate physical activity for caregivers indoors are urgently needed. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to co-design and develop a novel mobile app to educate and support carers in the undertaking of regular physical activity at home during and beyond COVID-19 restrictions via integration of the transtheoretical model of behavior change and UK physical activity guidelines. METHODS: We co-designed a mobile app, "CareFit," by directly involving caregivers, health care professionals, and social care professionals in the requirements, capturing, and evaluation phases of three Agile Scrum design and development sprints. Seven participants representing multistakeholder views took part in three co-design sessions, each of which was followed by a development sprint. Requirements for CareFit were grounded in a combination of behavioral change science and UK government guidelines for physical activity. RESULTS: Participants identified different barriers and enablers to physical activity, such as a lack of time, recognition of existing activities, and concerns regarding safely undertaking physical activity. Requirements analysis highlighted the importance of simplicity in design and a need to anchor development around the everyday needs of caregivers (eg, easy-to-use video instructions). Our final prototype app integrated guidance for undertaking physical activity at home through educational, physical activity, and communication components. CONCLUSIONS: Integrating government guidelines with models of behavioral change into a mobile app to support the physical activity of carers is novel. We found that integrating core physical activity guidelines into a co-designed smartphone app with functionality such as a weekly planner and educational material for users is feasible. This work holds promise to fill the gap of effective physical activity solutions for caregivers both during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Further work is now needed to explore the feasibility, acceptability, and usability of the approach in real-world settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".