YouTube as a source of information about pulmonary rehabilitation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND AIM: To our best knowledge, there is no literature on the effectiveness of YouTube on pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) practice. In our study, we aimed to evaluate the characteristics and medical aspects of videos on YouTube about PR. METHODS: In the internet media website YouTube.com search engine, the Word PR was searched on August 3, 2021, without any filter. The first 100 videos listed were classified according to the number of likes, dislikes, origin of country, and content of PR. The materials were evaluated in terms of intelligibility using the suitability assessment of materials (SAM). User participation measurements were obtained for each video. RESULTS: The later years were shown to have a statistically significant relationship with respiratory techniques, PR contraindications, and videos with PR in COVID in our study (p<0.05). However, no significant relationship was identified between the later years and smoking in PR and videos with PR in the intensive care unit (p>0.05). The total SAM score was found to significantly correlate with the number of views, likes, dislikes, comments, and video durations (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: It was observed that COVID videos with PR content were uploaded with regard to the specific video issues and treatment needs during and after the COVID infection in the later years, especially after the pandemic. Moreover, videos with high comprehensibility are more interesting for users, reflected in views, likes, dislikes, comments, and video duration. Higher quality videos created by health professionals will be more useful for patient education in the future.