Prescribe and Monitor Physical Activity Through a Community-Based eHealth Program: MOVIDA Platform

Modern portable devices (e.g. wearables) provide technical support to record physical activity, which can assist various purposes, ranging from geolocation, step count, body temperature and biomedical parameters among others. These technological advances, the increase of literacy in health and also in informatics placed the smartphone and its massive use in the center of a new paradigm of monitoring physical activity. When combining these functionalities with the ability to communicate with remote entities, then it is possible to expand the use of smartphones, not only to monitoring physical activity but also to promote widespread adherence to physical activity programs. This paper presents the conceptual framework of a global health community program centered on a mobile application and a dedicated backoffice web application to perform physical activity prescription and supervision based on dashboards. The MOVIDA platform is comprised of 4 main modules, targeting different groups of the population. This platform enables exercise prescription, monitoring of user's performance and adherence in metabolic diseases patients by MOVIDA.cronos, to specify and follow a cardiac rehabilitation program by MOVIDA.eros, to track and quantify indoor movements by MOVIDA.domus, and also access to a stratified training circuit, for maintaining or improve fitness level by MOVIDA.polis. In addition, this work reports the project main challenges from the conceptual phase of the technological platform to its development and implementation. This work can be useful for those who are starting a project with the same type of characteristics: multicentric, interdisciplinary and involving several partners in the community.