Health Education and Symptom Flare Management Using a Video-Based m-Health System for Caring Women with IC/BPS

To assess effectiveness of the video-based m-health system providing videos dictated by physicians for health education and symptom self-management for patients with IC/BPS.

An m-health system was designed to provide videos for weekly health education and symptom flare self-management. O'Leary-Sant index and VAS scale as well as SF-36 health survey were administrated to evaluate the disease severity and quality of life (QoL), respectively. A total of 60 IC/BPS patients were recruited and randomly assigned to either control group (30 patients) or study group (30 patients) in sequence depending on their orders to visit our urological clinic. Patients in both control and study groups received regular treatments, while those in the study group received additional video-based intervention. Statistical analyses were conducted to compare the outcomes between baseline and post-intervention for both groups. The outcomes of video-based intervention were also compared with the text-based intervention conducted in our previous study.

After video-based intervention, patients in the study group exhibited significant effect manifested in all disease severity and QoL assessments except the VAS pain scale, while no significance was found in the control group. Moreover, the study group exhibited more significant net improvements than the control group in 7 SF-36 constructs, except the mental health. The limitations include short intervention duration (8 weeks) and different study periods between text-based and video-based interventions.

Video-based intervention is effective in improving the QoL of IC/BPS patients and outperforms the text-based intervention even in a short period of intervention.

Urology. 2018 Jun 10 [Epub ahead of print]

Ming-Huei Lee, Huei-Ching Wu, Chien-Ming Tseng, Tsung-Liang Ko, Tang-Jun Weng, Yung-Fu Chen

Department of Management Information Systems, Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taichung, 40601 Taiwan; Department of Urology, Feng Yuan Hospital, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taichung, 42055 Taiwan; Department of Urology, Taichung Hospital, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taichung, 40343 Taiwan., Department of Urology, Feng Yuan Hospital, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taichung, 42055 Taiwan., Department of Management Information Systems, Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taichung, 40601 Taiwan., Department of Healthcare Administration, Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taichung, 40601 Taiwan; Computer Center, Feng Yuan Hospital, Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taichung, 42055 Taiwan., Department of Healthcare Administration, Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taichung, 40601 Taiwan., Department of Healthcare Administration, Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taichung, 40601 Taiwan; Department of Dental Technology and Materials Science, Central Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taichung, 40601 Taiwan; Department of Health Services Administration, China Medical University, Taichung, 40402 Taiwan; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, 84602 Utah, USA. Electronic address: .