An Apple Watch Dashboard for HiGHmed Heart Insufficency Patients

Abstract

Wearables are commercially available devices allowing continuous monitoring of users’ health parameters. Their easy availability, increasing accuracy and functionality render them relevant for medical practice, specifically for longitudinal monitoring. There are clear benefits for the health care system, such as the opportunity of timely interventions by monitoring a patient during his daily life, resulting in a cost reduction in medical care and improved patient well-being. However, some tools are essential to enable the application of wearables in medical daily practice. For example, there is a need for software solutions that allow clinicians to quickly and easily analyze data from devices of their patients. The goal of this study was to develop a dashboard for physicians, which allows rapid data interpretation of longitudinal data from the Apple Watch. The prototype dashboard is an interactive web-based visualization platform utilizing Plotly. The dashboard displays the most important parameters like heart rate, steps per day, activity, exercise collected by the Apple Watch in a user-friendly and accessible way. Clear visualization makes it easy to identify trends or deviations in the data and see how these changes in daily behaviour affect patients’ health. Our software is a key component to monitor patients with heart failure who participate in the HiGHmed use case cardiology project.