Using a mobile health application to support self-management in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a six-month cohort study

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Research Article

Carmelo Velardo¹  Syed Ahmar Shah¹  Lionel Tarassenko¹  Andrew Farmer²  Veronika Williams²  Heather Rutter³  Maxine Hardinge⁴ 

[1] Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK;Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK;Oxford Health Foundation Trust, Oxford, UK;Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, Oxford, UK;

关键词: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease;    Chronic condition;    Self-management;    Telehealth;    Digital health;    E-health;    Mobile health;    Alerts;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12911-015-0171-5

 received in 2015-01-19, accepted in 2015-06-10,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundSelf-management strategies have the potential to support patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Telehealth interventions may have a role in delivering this support along with the opportunity to monitor symptoms and physiological variables. This paper reports findings from a six-month, clinical, cohort study of COPD patients’ use of a mobile telehealth based (mHealth) application and how individually determined alerts in oxygen saturation levels, pulse rate and symptoms scores related to patient self-initiated treatment for exacerbations.MethodsThe development of the mHealth intervention involved a patient focus group and multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers and clinicians. Individual data thresholds to set alerts were determined, and the relationship to exacerbations, defined by the initiation of stand-by medications, was measured. The sample comprised 18 patients (age range of 50–85 years) with varied levels of computer skills.ResultsPatients identified no difficulties in using the mHealth application and used all functions available. 40 % of exacerbations had an alert signal during the three days prior to a patient starting medication. Patients were able to use the mHealth application to support self- management, including monitoring of clinical data. Within three months, 95 % of symptom reporting sessions were completed in less than 100 s.ConclusionsHome based, unassisted, daily use of the mHealth platform is feasible and acceptable to people with COPD for reporting daily symptoms and medicine use, and to measure physiological variables such as pulse rate and oxygen saturation. These findings provide evidence for integrating telehealth interventions with clinical care pathways to support self-management in COPD.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Hardinge et al. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.