Darcy Ummels

116 | Chapter 6 therapy. Despite the attention to and the benefits of activity trackers, to our knowledge, no studies have been performed in which activity trackers were implemented in health care. The bottleneck of using eHealth in healthcare is often the transition from pilot phase to implementation. 34,35 Several barriers and facilitators regarding the implementation of eHealth and activity tracker measurement tools in daily clinical practice are known from the literature, such as complexity of the tool, privacy/security, compatibility with existing systems, and digital health literacy. 36 ‐ 39 An action research design could help to transfer eHealth from the pilot phase to implementation. An action research design is not only used to develop knowledge and to understand the context but also to purposefully change this context and provide empowerment for the participants. 40 ‐ 43 By active participation, the participants can use the activity tracker and experience the use in daily practice. In this way, the participants gain knowledge about how and when they can use an activity tracker. This gained knowledge about activity trackers is context ‐ specific and can directly be applied to their daily work. The main aims of this study were to support healthcare professionals and patients with embedding an activity tracker in daily clinical practice to aid clinical reasoning and facilitate engagement of the patients in their treatment and to gain knowledge about the implementation process in clinical practice. Therefore, the following research questions were formulated: (1) How do healthcare professionals and patients use an activity tracker used in clinical practice? and (2) What are the experiences of healthcare professionals and patients with an activity tracker in clinical practice? Materials and methods By using an action research design, healthcare professionals and patients were given the opportunity to experience, reflect, and learn about how and when they can use an activity tracker. 40 This design allows for collecting more genuine and in ‐ depth knowledge about the participants’ use and experiences. An action research design consists of four phases (Figure 6.1): (1) a plan, (2) an act and observe, (3) a reflect, and (4) a revised plan phase.