Overview of health behavior change interventions to promote physical-activity-related adherence in patients with heart disease

The ongoing increase in the incidence of cardiovascular disease is often associated with unhealthy lifestyle choices, while healthy lifestyle is one of the most important medical recommendations for patients with heart disease. Despite the importance of making healthy decisions daily, patient adherence to such changes is typically poor with the lowest level reported on physical activity regimen. To facilitate patient health behavior change towards a healthy lifestyle, use of health behavior interventions seems to be the most preferred tool in cardiac care routine. However, the question about use and development of successful interventions is remaining of relevance due the increasing rates of patient dropouts in rehabilitation programs and hospital readmissions. Researchers from different domains, including eHealth, are working on enabling intervention optimization. Thus, to analyze the design components that can be further used in patient adherence intervention development from the Health behavior informatics perspective, this paper provides an overview of interventions' designs in the domain of physical-activity-related adherence in patients with heart disease. The analysis of the design approaches lead to the conclusion that the central elements for intervention design are the target patient population with its specific characteristics, and chosen type of physical-activity-related behavior. Additionally, we have found that study design and its quality should be considered when analyzing a specific intervention or intervention program effect.