Telerehabilitation with breathing exercises as a strategy to improve functional capacity of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: randomized clinical trial.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to analyze the effects of two proposed telerehabilitation interventions on the functional capacity of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. METHODS: A randomized clinical trial was conducted with 60 patients of both sexes equally distributed into two groups: G1, submitted to a protocol of breathing exercises and health education; and G2, submitted only to health education. The interventions were performed remotely through videoconferencing with patients in their homes for 8 weeks. RESULTS: When comparing the pre- and post-intervention moments of G1 and G2, significant differences were found in the functional capacity scores in both cases (p=0.0001), however, when comparing the post-intervention moment of the two groups, the improvement was more significant in G1 (p=0.0007). CONCLUSION: Both telerehabilitation with a respiratory exercise protocol associated with health education, and telerehabilitation with only a health education protocol are beneficial for the functional capacity of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. However, the telerehabilitation with a breathing exercise protocol associated with health education had a greater impact on the improvement of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.