Monitoring Cardiovascular Disease-Patients with Mobile Computing Technologies

Physicians and healthcare networks have been slow to adopt electronic medical records and to integrate medical data with the ubiquitous mobile device. Mobile and wearable systems for continuous health monitoring constitute a key technology in helping the transition of health care to a more proactive and affordable healthcare. Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) includes dysfunctional conditions of the heart, arteries, and veins that supply oxygen to vital life-sustaining areas/organs of the body. CVD singly accounts for about 40% of all deaths worldwide. Over 80 per cent of CVD deaths take place in low- and middle-income countries. An estimated 17.5 million people died from cardiovascular disease in 2005, and expected to top 20 million per year by 2015. By 2030, more than 23 million people will die annually from CVDs. CVDs’ patients face risks of recurrent acute cardiovascular events, hospital readmission, and unfavourable quality of life. Heart Failure, (HF), leads to death if not properly managed and supervised. Current treatments for Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) provide a limited palliative outcome. New technologies are now pertinent to generate high-dimensional data that provideunprecedented opportunities for unbiased identification of biomarkers that can be used to optimize pre-operative planning, with the goal of avoiding costly post-operative complications and prolonged hospitalization. Due to the crucial role of remote monitoring for CVD patients, significant efforts from research communities and industry to propose and design a variety of CVD monitoring devices have become imperative. This paper builds a proof-of-concept andpresents a cardiovascular monitoring system, Cardiovascular Disease Management System (CVDMS), for real-time information on patient’s heart health status with respect to his/her heart beat in hemodynamics computation towards reducing re-admission incidence problem. Administered 485 questionnaires and interviewed 12 cardiologists, 45 physicians, and 23pharmacists to gather details on vital CVD parameters. 469 of 485 questionnaires (96.70%) were validly completed and returned, while 16 (3.30%) were not. Searched internet databases and cognate texts for literature. A mobile CVDMS for HF was developed using UML, MySQL Server 5.0,Java servlets, Apache Tomcat 6.0 server, microcontroller, and Ozeki sms server. Patient completes a questionnaire on a J2ME platform-based computing device that measures the heartbeat rate. Biological signals acquired by CVDMS are processed by microcontroller. Pulses are counted within a space of one minute to know heartbeat rate per minute. The CVDMS application gets the heartbeat reading, and if the heart rate is abnormal, a trigger is set enabling the Ozeki SMS Gateway to send an alert to patient’s next-of-kin and cardiologist. CVDMS guarantees individual patient’s direct involvement to closely monitor changes in his/her vital signs and provide feedback to maintain an optimal health status. Medical personnel get alerted when life-threatening changes occur in establishing proper communication between patient and cardiologist via sms. Hemodynamics computation could be performed with the parametersobtained from the data supplied by CVDMS as a cardiovascular intervention to save many lives and improve quality of life.Keywords: artery stiffness; blood pressure; cardiologist; cardiovascular disease; heart attack; heart failure; hemodynamic volumetric parameters; hospital readmission; hypertension; risk-factor