Sustaining physical activity following cardiac rehabilitation discharge

Because many patients reduce exercise following outpatient cardiac rehabilitation (CR), we developed an intervention to assist with the transition and evaluated its feasibility and preliminary efficacy using a one-group pretest–posttest design. Five CR patients were enrolled ~1 month prior to CR discharge and provided an activity tracker. Each week during CR they received a summary of their physical activity and steps. Following CR discharge, participants received an individualized report that included their physical activity and step history, information on specific features of the activity tracker, and encouraging messages from former CR patients for each of the next 6 weeks. Mixed model trajectory analyses were used to test the intervention effect separately for active minutes and steps modeling three study phases: pre-intervention (day activity tracking began to CR discharge), intervention (day following CR discharge to day when final report sent), and maintenance (day following the final report to ~1 month later). Activity tracking was successfully deployed and, with weekly reports following CR, may offset the usual decline in physical activity. When weekly reports ceased, a decline in steps/day occurred. A scaled-up intervention with a more rigorous study design with sufficient sample size can evaluate this approach further.