遠距醫療及遠距教學的應用－網路減重計劃之初探

Most of the hospitals now have established weight-loss program helping people to overcome the problem of fatness. In current practice, patients who enrolled must go to hospital at a specific timeframe to join the program for review, diet consulting course, or exercise training. With the concept of telemedicine together with distance learning, it will be more convenient for patients to participate the programs without limitation of time and place, and ideally the attendees can be as many as possible so that more people can be beneficial from.
In this study, we attempted to implement a system using current off-the shelf information technologies of software and hardware to set up a virtual classroom on the Internet for weight-loss program. The purpose of this study is to reveal that a weight-loss program through telemedicine and distance learning could be as effective as the current process which patients need to visit hospital periodically. Moreover it is expected to find out the limitation and improvement needed for setting up the Internet weight-loss program.
Volunteers of this experiment were divided into two groups, virtual class and traditional class, without any baseline differences in body weight, BMI, the percentage of body fat, waist circumference, and hip circumference. After a 3-month weight-loss program, data had been collected to make comparison. The result showed that weight-loss program through virtual class was acceptable and effective; only the improvement was slower than the traditional class. Participants in virtual class had better interaction with the medical stuffs due to the features telemedicine and distance learning could bring, but they had less sustainability of enrollment because of lack of direct monitoring which was the key successful factor that made the traditional program work.