The Effectiveness of Self-management Education Based on the Mobile Application on the Quality of Life of People with Parkinson’s Disease

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive and chronic neurological disease with severe motor and non-motor disabilities that affect patients’ quality of life. Considering the importance of self-management education in chronic disease to improve quality of life, an upward trend of using mobile applications has recently been considered in clinical settings.

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of self-management education based on the mobile application on the quality of life of Parkinson’s disease.

This quasi-experimental study was conducted in the neurology clinics of selected educational centers of Iran University of medical sciences with 77 patients, with a convenience sampling method. After obtaining the code of ethics, the clinical trial code and obtaining written informed consent from eligible people, the Demographic checklist, clinical stage criteria, and quality of life questionnaire in Parkinson’s disease (PDQ-39) were sent by online links to eligible patients or caregivers before, one month after, and three months after the start of the intervention (12 weeks intervention). The content of the self-management education extracted from reliable medical, nursing, and rehabilitation references based on the mobile application "Parkin Seven," designed by a software consultant engineer, was provided to the clients at once by installing the mobile application in the research environment, with 15 - 20 minutes of in-person mobile application set up education. Data were analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance in SPSS20 software.

The quality of life in the first stage was estimated at 48.26 ± 2.37, which was 34.27 ± 2.08 and 24.33 ± 1.76 for the second and third stages, respectively (P < 0.001).

Findings from this study indicate that self-management education based on a mobile application in patients with Parkinson’s disease effectively improves the quality of life. Therefore, utilizing this method by clinical professionals, especially rehabilitation nurses, is recommended to improve clinical efficiency.