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Faye Prior | 2014-06-16 06:28:48
Chronic fatigue syndrome is a condition which causes persistent tiredness and muscular pain, which doesn’t go away with sleep or rest, and which unsurprisingly can severely affect the daily functioning of individuals.
To treat chronic fatigue syndrome, doctors usually prescribe targets for set amounts of sleep, rest, and activity that a person should have each day. To do this they need to understand what amount of sleep, rest, and activity a person gets on average to begin with. From this they can gradually prescribe increasing amounts of activity and decreasing amounts of rest to improve symptoms and daily productivity.
Currently, to measure these baseline levels doctors ask their patients to fill out a paper diary of their day. If you can imagine writing down everything that you do each day and when, you can see how you might forget to do so, or might even make it up. This is a problem, since if you don’t report an accurate baseline, your doctor can’t prescribe you an effective treatment.
Researchers and doctors in Manchester have teamed up to see how using a wrist worn activity tracker can address these problems. They have been using activity trackers to record the baseline levels of sleep and rest that their chronic fatigue syndrome patients get every day.
After this, patients synchronise their activity tracker to a specially designed smart phone app, which uploads their daily activity levels. This information is transmitted to their doctor in real time, and the app allows the doctor to send an ‘activity and rest’ prescription to their patient’s smartphone, so the patient knows how much activity, rest, and sleep to get if they want to avoid debilitating fatigue. Since the patients are wearing an activity tracker, the doctor can then see if the patient sticks to this prescription.
These trials are still on-going, but preliminary results show that this is a convenient and effective way of using technology to treat chronic fatigue syndrome for both the patient and doctor.
Faye Prior (Researcher)
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