Telerehabilitation in COPD

The prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in Turkey is 10%. Patients with COPD have a decreased physical capacity. Decreased physical activity in COPD patients causes an increase in all-cause mortality. Pulmonary rehabilitation contributes to increasing physical capacity and quality of life in COPD patients. However, a limited number of patients have access to pulmonary rehabilitation. Some of the patients drop out of pulmonary rehabilitation due to reasons such as transport difficulties, low social support, and low professional support. In addition, disruption of daily routine is one of the important reasons for this situation. Telerehabilitation can enable more patients to access pulmonary rehabilitation. Education and exercise programs can be followed with telerehabilitation in patients with COPD. An increase in exercise capacity and a decrease in dyspnea have been achieved with telerehabilitation in COPD patients.

Different technologies such as telephone, video conferencing or web sites can be used for telerehabilitation. Also, mobile phone was used to telerehabilitation. To make pulmonary telerehabilitation completely patient-based, we have developed an application suitable for smartphones. The application contains videos which showing how to perform pulmonary rehabilitation exercise videos, and it allows the participants to follow up compliance with pulmonary rehabilitation daily. The application will be downloaded to the smartphones of the participants, and it will be shown how to use the application. Participants will not be shown pulmonary rehabilitation exercises.

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of telerehabilitation with the application program on physical capacity, quality of life, and dyspnea perception in COPD patients.