The development of activity program for enhancing physical fitness and quality of life of the elderly

This study aimed to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of an activity program in enhancing the physical fitness and quality of life for the elderly. The methods included: 1) The program development is based on Pender’s Health Enhancing Theory and Protection Motivation Theory. The program’s quality is assessed by examining the IOC. 2) The program’s effectiveness was assessed by using 60 purposively selected elderly who volunteered and passed the Inclusion criterion. The data were collected three times: before the experiment, after the experiment 4 weeks and 8 weeks, and were analyzed by means, standard deviation, ANOVA with repeated measures, post hoc multiple comparisons Scheffe and t-test at the statistical significance level of 0.05. The research findings were as follows: 1) The development of the activity program consisted of 8 different activities: self-assessment, knowledge of the elderly, recreation for health, aerobic exercise, exercise using elastic, yoga, relaxation, and group counseling. The eight activities had an aggregate IOC of 0.96. 2) The effectiveness of the activity program development found that the average scores of physical fitness and quality of life of the experimental group and control group were significantly different at .05 levels after the 4th week and 8th week. The research findings reveal the effectiveness of the activity program for enhancing physical fitness and quality of life of elderly progressive conditions.