Supporting heart failure patients through personalized mobile health monitoring

Heart failure is a common chronic condition requiring frequent attention and ongoing provision of healthcare services. In this context we present a personalized mobile-based home monitoring system aiming to support heart failure patients in daily self-monitoring of their condition. An Internet-linked tablet computer and various portable and wearable sensing devices are employed in order to monitor the patient´s physiological parameters and enable healthcare professionals to review patient´s status remotely. The proposed system supports the activation/deactivation of system functional components by healthcare professionals during run-time operation, the unobtrusive remote upgrade of the mobile system through a private application distribution channel, and the automatic recording of user interactions, in order to meet the patient´s ongoing individualized preferences and healthcare needs. Preliminary results from an observational cohort study indicate that heart failure patients find the proposed system acceptable and consider it useful for self-monitoring their condition.