Self-management of COPD supported by eHealth: Patients’ attitudes towards monitoring, risk prediction and virtual coaching

Purpose: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has a high burden on patients, tremendously affecting their quality of life. For patients to be more pro-active, self-management is important. To support patients in their self-management, health data collection is needed for monitoring, which can be used for risk predictions and personalised coaching. Within the RE-SAMPLE project, we want to include these features in an eHealth technology. This study aims to investigate the attitudes of people with COPD towards health monitoring, risk predictions and virtual coaching.

Methods: We conducted workshops and interviews with persons diagnosed with COPD. Six persons participated in the workshops which focused on topics for virtual coaching. Ten persons participated in the interviews focusing on monitoring, risk prediction and virtual coaching. Results: In general, participants were positive towards the concepts health monitoring, risk predictions and virtual coaching within a self-management eHealth technology. However, most participants felt that persons who are more recently diagnosed with COPD would benefit more from using such a technology. People who are dealing with COPD for several years already know or think they know how to self-manage their disease and what helps them and what not. Conclusion: Based on our findings, we discuss several implications for design of self-management eHealth technologies for COPD: personalization in context and level of details, supporting people to reflect on their behaviour and patterns detected in the monitoring, balance accountability and paternalism when it comes to coaching, and finally explainable AI concerning risk predictions. Furthermore, we want to argue that in these types of studies, it is also important to include people newly diagnosed with COPD to have more inclusive results.