Breathe - Respiratory rehabilitation for Covid-19

Important results from the project

The purpose of project Breathe is to help people strengthen and rebuild their breathing function during or after severe illness such as Covid-19, asthma, intensive care or similar by developing a mobile app with breathing exercises for self-rehabilitation. The project has collaborated with expertise in respiration, intensive care and rehabilitation as well as patients to develop the rehabilitation program, breathing exercises and a mobile app that makes it possible to help people on a much larger scale than would have been possible with classic person-based rehabilitation.

Expected long term effects

The project is proud to have completed the development of the main deliverables; the rehabilitation program for digital self-rehabilitation and the mobile app, which is available and published for both Android and Apple (iOS). Despite several technical and resource-related challenges that caused delays in completion, the project goals have been achieved thanks to great dedication and commitment from everyone involved. The reception has been very positive from both users and healthcare in terms of ease of use and exercise effect.

Approach and implementation

Selection of experiences identified in the project evaluation: + Collaboration between project parties and others involved has been excellent. + Testing on patients before recording videos was very important as the experiences could be incorporated into the exercises early. + User Experience Design (UX) took more time than estimated due to extensive knowledge gathering and in-depth interviews with users but provided very valuable insights into user needs. - The burden of the pandemic on healthcare limited the opportunities to validate exercises through spirometry.