FAB study: Fan, Activity and Breathlessness: assessing the fan’s capacity to increase physical activity in patients with breathlessness and reducing carer anxiety

Many people live with the distress and difficulties arising from breathlessness which continues despite treatment of the disease which is causing it. Exercise is known to be important and helpful for breathlessness, but the breathlessness itself, inevitably triggered by exertion, often puts people off persisting with this. Simple measures such as the use of a hand held battery operated fan to give cool airflow to the face can be helpful in easing breathlessness. The fan is cheap, easy to use and to carry around and something that both patient and their carer can manage, but it has never been assessed to see whether such a simple device could support people to exercise more as part of their daily routine. However, it is likely that in order to test this question, we will need a big study with several research teams who have an interest in the area working together. This study is the first step in planning such a study involving colleagues in the UK and Australia. This first stage, therefore, is to see how we should set up such a study with regard to the following: 1. Will patient participants find the study we propose acceptable and practical? 2. What are the practicalities of working together with colleagues from the UK? 3. What number of participants would we need to make the full study able to answer our research question and is it possible to recruit sufficient numbers?