When it comes to tracking patients’ physical activity, smartphones seem to the better and more preferred option from the perspective of doctors, researchers say.
The new study involved 500 patients who were a part of activity tracking programs at two Philadelphia hospitals. Half the group used a smartphone app to track their steps after leaving the hospital, while the other half used a wearable device. The patients would then send their step data to researchers regularly.
After analyzing the data, patients tracking their steps with a smartphone app were more likely to send their data than those wearing devices, making it easier for doctor’s to keep up with their patients’ well-being.
Thirty days after hospital discharge, 87% of the smartphone group were still sending in their data, compared to 82% of those with wearable devices.
After three months, those rates dropped to 78% and 68%, respectively; and then after six months, the dropped substantially again – were 61% and 47%, respectively.
The University of Pennsylvania study was recently published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
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“Most people with smartphones take them everywhere they go. Since carrying the phone is already a built-in habit, it makes it much easier to use the device to track activity levels,” said lead author Dr. Mitesh Patel, an assistant professor of medicine.
“While wearables can track other metrics, every time patient takes them off, there’s a possibility that they may never put it back on again,” he added in a university news release.
The study also discovered that men were more likely to continue reporting their step data compared to women; and people with medical insurance were nearly twice as responsive as people without it.
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