The effectiveness of e-interventions on fall, neuromuscular functions and quality of life in community-dwelling older adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Section snippets
What is already known about the topic?
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Preventing falls in older adults is important to ensure that they can live in a fulfilling and meaningful manner with high quality of life.
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Both traditional and electronic interventions have shown effectiveness on fall prevention.
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Currently, there is no systematic review and meta-analysis evaluated the overall effect of different e-interventions for fall prevention.
What this paper adds
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This review filled in a gap in existing literature by assessing the effectiveness of various types of e-interventions for the prevention of falls in community-dwelling older adults.
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E-interventions significantly reduce fall incidence, improve balance, fall efficacy. However, e-interventions were not able to significantly improve lower extremity strength, cognitive function or health-related quality of life.
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Telehealth and exercise, and smart home systems showed the best evidence of effectiveness
Method
This systematic review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) (Moher, Liberati, Tetzlaff, Altman and PRISMA Group, 2009). To prevent duplication of reviews, a search for previous and ongoing systematic reviews (SRs) similar to this study was conducted. This SR has been registered with PROSPERO (CRD42020203930).
Study selection
A total of 1,702 records were gathered from various databases and four from hand searching. After removing duplicates, 1,311 records remained. Screening by two independent authors resulted in 1,017 records removed for not having key words in the title and another 175 records removed for not meeting the inclusion criteria after reading abstracts. Finally, 119 records with corresponding full texts were screened according to the eligibility criteria. Reasons for exclusion are listed in full in the
Discussion on the findings
This review investigated the effectiveness of e-interventions on proportion of fallers, balance, lower extremity strength, fall efficacy, cognitive function, and quality of life among community-dwelling older adults. Six types of e-interventions were reviewed: telehealth, exergames, cognitive games training, NCBT, smart home systems and socialized training. In this review, telehealth significantly improved fall outcomes in decreasing fall risk by 21% compared to controls. The fall risk ratio
Conclusion
This review examined the best available evidence of the effectiveness of various e-interventions in preventing falls in community-dwelling older adults. Six fall-related outcomes were investigated. Limited studies were found for four out of six types of interventions. E-interventions were able to improve four of the six fall-related outcomes. E-interventions significantly reduced fall risk. Balance and fall efficacy scores were significantly improved by e-interventions, barring small effect
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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