Results of the usability and acceptance evaluation of a cardiac rehabilitation system

Abstract

Cardiac rehabilitation programs are extremely important during the recovery phase of patients who suffered a Myocardial Infarction (MI). Traditionally, these programs aimed at recovering the cardiovascular functioning by means of tailored exercise programs. However, during the last years, researchers and practitioners have started to consider a multi disciplinary approach for the interventions, where patient education and health behaviors changes play a central role both in rehabilitation and in secondary prevention. Nevertheless, the lack of resources and the need to have health professionals continuously involved in the patient supervision process, does not make possible to extend rehabilitation programs to all potential patients in the health care system. This paper presents the results of the usability and acceptance validation of a personalized home based cardiac rehabilitation system developed under the framework of HeartCycle, a project partially funded by the European Commission. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.