Patients Using an Online Forum for Reporting Progress When Engaging With a Six-Week Exercise Program for Knee Conditioning: Feasibility Study.
Philip Bright, Karen Hambly
PMID 29699967WHAT IT FOUND
Most healthy students dropped out of an online forum reporting knee exercises.
Those who stayed posted enough data to track their progress individually. Gender, age, and body mass index did not predict who kept reporting. The study did not test if the exercises worked.
Key findings
01Twelve of nineteen participants engaged with the online forum, and the main question of whether gender, age, or body mass index predicted this engagement found no significant differences.
02Five of the twelve who engaged posted consistent data across all six weeks, allowing three of them to be analysed as individual case studies of their exercise progress.
03Six participants posted brief comments about their experience, describing pain and how they changed their position or equipment to reduce it.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study was designed to test whether an online forum was workable, not whether the exercises improved knee function. It cannot tell you if this program helps patients. All nineteen participants were healthy undergraduate students with no knee pain. The results may not apply to patients who are symptomatic, in pain, or less familiar with digital tools. Attrition was high: twelve of nineteen engaged with the forum and only five posted consistent data across the full six weeks. The sample was small and drawn from a convenience pool of students. The case study analysis looked at only three individuals. Socioeconomic background was not recorded, which the authors note is a known barrier to using online health tools. The authors describe the participants as patients in the discussion, but they were recruited students without knee conditions.
Declared interests
The paper does not report any funding source or conflict of interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the significant force changes in the three case studies as evidence that this exercise program works. The study was a feasibility check on the online forum, not a trial of the exercises. It used a convenience sample of healthy students, had high dropout, and did not compare the program to any control group.