Primary Prevention of Asymptomatic Cardiovascular Disease Using Physiological Sensors Connected to an iOS App

Virtual Health Care for Community Management of Patients With COVID-19 in Australia: Observational Cohort Study

Background

Australia has successfully controlled the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar to other high-income countries, Australia has extensively used telehealth services. Virtual health care, including telemedicine in combination with remote patient monitoring, has been implemented in certain settings as part of new models of care that are aimed at managing patients with COVID-19 outside the hospital setting.

Objective

This study aimed to describe the implementation of and early experience with virtual health care for community management of patients with COVID-19.

Methods

This observational cohort study was conducted with patients with COVID-19 who availed of a large Australian metropolitan health service with an established virtual health care program capable of monitoring patients remotely. We included patients with COVID-19 who received the health service, could self-isolate safely, did not require immediate admission to an in-patient setting, had no major active comorbid illness, and could be managed at home or at other suitable sites. Skin temperature, pulse rate, and blood oxygen saturation were remotely monitored. The primary outcome measures were care escalation rates, including emergency department presentation, and hospital admission.

Results

During March 11-29, 2020, a total of 162 of 173 (93.6%) patients with COVID-19 (median age 38 years, range 11-79 years), who were diagnosed locally, were enrolled in the virtual health care program. For 62 of 162 (38.3%) patients discharged during this period, the median length of stay was 8 (range 1-17) days. The peak of 100 prevalent patients equated to approximately 25 patients per registered nurse per shift. Patients were contacted a median of 16 (range 1-30) times during this period. Video consultations (n=1902, 66.3%) comprised most of the patient contacts, and 132 (81.5%) patients were monitored remotely. Care escalation rates were low, with an ambulance attendance rate of 3% (n=5), emergency department attendance rate of 2.5% (n=4), and hospital admission rate of 1.9% (n=3). No deaths were recorded.

Conclusions

Community-based virtual health care is safe for managing most patients with COVID-19 and can be rapidly implemented in an urban Australian setting for pandemic management. Health services implementing virtual health care should anticipate challenges associated with rapid technology deployments and provide adequate support to resolve them, including strategies to support the use of health information technologies among consumers.

A mobile app for Glaucoma diagnosis and its possible clinical applications

BACKGROUND

Nowadays, the latent power of technology, which can offer innovative resolutions to disease diagnosis, has awakened high-level anticipation in the community of patients as well as professionals. An easy-to-use mobile app is developed by us, which is purposefully intended for those patients with glaucoma.

METHODS

A mobile App has been invented for smartphones for the convenient use wherever and whenever. The corresponding experiments carried out by public retinal image database and real captured clinical data reveal the ideal classification accuracy of the App. Also, user feedback evaluation is also carried out in terms of performance test as well as and users' experience.

RESULTS

For clinical test using Yanbao App, we found 274 patients for the identification with 648 retinal images to be evaluated by glaucoma classification. Of the 243 glaucoma patients, 191 were screened out with an accuracy of 0.7860 (sensitivity); the number of non-glaucoma patients was 310 of 405, and the accuracy reached 0.7654 (specificity).` The total Accuracy amounted to 0.7731, and the result is close to the test performance obtained on public dataset ORIGA and DRISHTI-GS1.

CONCLUSIONS

Yanbao App can be applied as an innovative approach exploiting mobile technology to enhance the clinicians' efficiency and a balanced medical resources as well as a provided better tiered medical service system.

Reviewing Mobile Apps to Control Heart Rate in Literature and Virtual Stores

BACKGROUND

Information and communications technologies are transforming our social interactions and life-styles. One of the most promising applications of information technology is healthcare and wellness management that characterized by early detection of conditions, prevention, and long-term healthcare management.

OBJECTIVE

The main purpose of this document is to do a study, first about the actual literature about mobile phone applications to measure and control heart-rate and second a study about these applications themselves, analyzing the different app stores more popular nowadays, Google Play Store and iTunes (for Android and iOS devices respectively).

METHODS

The Web portals and databases that were used to perform the searches are IEEE Xplore, National Center for Biotechnology Information, Springer, ResearchGate, Science Direct and Scopus, taking into account the date of publication from 2010 to 2018, publications in English and Spanish.

RESULTS

40 relevant papers have been found related to mobile phone apps to measure and control heart rate. The results show that of a total of 400 applications found 61.25% of them are in the Play Store (Android systems) and the remaining 38.75% were found in the iTunes Store (iOS systems).

CONCLUSIONS

From the review of the research articles analyzed, it can be said that the most applications found are for Android devices. They occupy 76.53% of the world mobile phone market, while iOS only owns 18.97%.