Sports medical app support the health and fitness of workers

Samenvatting

This paper describes the development and first version of an eHealth system for sports physicians who support employees in improving their health and fitness. Regular physical activity improves quality of life and has various health benefits. Companies have an interest in the health and fitness of their employees. For employers it is important to encourage this in a safe way. To this end, the sports physicians of Isala Hospital in Zwolle, The Netherlands, offer sports medical examination and guidance programs to companies. The sports physicians wanted to use smartphone technology to improve and expand their services. It was important for them to have all the client data stored confidentially in one database under their own supervision, e.g., to perform scientific analyses. Since not all details of the end product were clear at the start of the project, an incremental and iterative development method was used. In this way, a prototype online and mobile data tracking system is developed that makes it possible (among others) to: give employees access to their sports medical examinations results with personalized standard values; insert goals that are advised by the sport physicians; use a heart rate sensor and a smartphone application (app) for training data entry by the employees themselves; import data from other sports apps; compute individual ‘s heart rate zones and energy use of a training based on sports medical test results. A focus group session with sports physicians have been performed to evaluate the prototype and to discuss extensions. Important enhancements include periodical entry of health data and comparing sports activities with the Dutch Standard for Healthy Exercise and the Fit Standard. We present the approach we have chosen and the functionalities of the first prototype of the system, which typically make it an application that supports sports medical services.