A nurse-led mHealth intervention to alleviate depressive symptoms in older adults living alone in the community: A quasi-experimental study

Abstract

Background: The prevalence of geriatric depression has increased worldwide, becoming a major contributor to the burden of health care costs. Geriatric depression is difficult to detect in daily life because of its atypical pre-sentation for each person. Therefore, there is an emerging need to develop personalised mHealth interventions for older adults with depression based on data from an ecological momentary assessment.Objective: To develop and evaluate the effect of a nurse-led mHealth intervention of geriatric depression in older adults living alone.Design: A quasi-experimental research design was used, and the study followed the transparent reporting of eval-uations with a nonrandomised design statement.Setting: The nurse-led mHealth intervention was developed and evaluated in a community senior centre in Seoul, Korea. Participants: Sixty-four older adults living alone with depressive symptoms were recruited between 1 October 2018 and 1 October 2019. Methods: Study participants were randomly assigned to the intervention or control groups by drawing lots. In the intervention group, nurses repeatedly assessed older adults' depressive symptoms using an ecolog-ical momentary assessment via a mobile tablet. The intervention consisted of weekly sessions, which in -cl uded (1) standardised mHealth device training, (2) a nur se-led mHealth programme, and (3) art activities. The control group received care as usual. Intra-and inter-group differences were evaluated using paired t-tests and analysis of covariance was used to assess subjective depression symptoms. A linear mixed-model was used to analyse the relationship between groups and momentary scores over time. Results: The average age of the final sample was 76.2 years (SD = 6.06), 63.6 % (28/44) of whom were fe -male. Compared with the control group (n = 23), the intervention group (n = 21) showed a decreased de -pression score (t = 4.041, p = .027). There was no statistical difference between the intervention and control groups based on traditional scales and the ecological momentary assessment. However, our data from the ecological momentary assessment captures clear fluctuating patterns across the days during the study, which traditional scales could not measure.Conclusions: Most of the older adults successfully participated in a nurse-led mHealth intervention that in-cluded multiple components of a non-pharmacologi cal approach to address depression. Mental health nurses should perform critical roles to personalise mHealth activities considering the older adult's auton-omy and supportive decision-making, specifically when using high-technological intervention. Future re-search should maximise the methodological and clinical advantage of an ecological momentary assessment of geriatric depression. Registration: Clinical Research Information Service number KCT0005073.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).