The Recent Advances of Mobile Healthcare in Cardiology Practice

Abstract

Background: Digitalization of healthcare led to the optimization of monitoring, diagnostics, and treatment of the range of disorders. Taking into account recent situation with COVID-19 pandemics, digital technologies allowed to improve management of viral infections via remote monitoring and diagnostics of infected patients. Up to date, various mobile health applications (apps) have been proposed, including apps for the patients diagnosed with cardiovascular pathologies. Objective: The presented review aimed at the analyses of a range of mHealth solutions used to improve primary cardiac care. In addition, we studied the factors driving and hindering the wide introduction of mHealth services in the clinics. Methods: The work was based on the guidelines of the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) statement. The publication search was carried out using PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases. Studies published during the period from 2014 until January 2022 were selected for the analysis. The evaluation of risk of bias for the included studies was conducted using the Cochrane Collaboration Risk of Bias tool. Results and Discussion: An overall 5513 studies were assessed for eligibility after which 39 studies were included.. The main trend in the mobile health for cardiological applications is the use of different types of wearable devices and Artificial Intelligence-platforms. In fact, mobile technology allows remotely to monitor, interpret, and analyze biomedical data collected from the patient. Conclusion: The results of this literature search demonstrated that patients diagnosed with cardiovascular disorders can potentially benefit from the application of mHealth in cardiology. However, despite the proven advantages of mHealth for cardiology, there are many challenges and concerns regarding effectiveness, safety, reliability and the lack of official regulation and guidelines from official organizations. Such issues require solutions and further work towards a wide implementation of mHealth technologies in cardiac practice.

Cardiology in a Digital Age: Opportunities and Challenges for e-Health: A Literature Review

“…Digital tools offer the opportunity to optimize care activities and services while increasing their quality. Indeed, they provide the possibility for analyzing massive amounts of data within a short time, consequently improving prevention, decision-making processes, and cardiac diagnostics [ 26 ].…”

“…According to several studies, such involvement raises the rate of adherence to the therapy and positively impacts cardiac rehabilitation, reducing symptoms, improving the psychological status of patients, and reducing their mortality rate [ 26 ].…”

“…In most of the studies, it is pointed out that the lack of clear national standards [ 26 ] and guidelines [ 48 ] relating to the development of e-health poses important barriers to the spread of this new model of care. Furthermore, there is a lack of transparent regulation on the management of data collected from patients, ethical standards on their use [ 35 ], and common reference values for monitoring the effectiveness of given technologies [ 33 ].…”

The Effectiveness of Hands-Only Offline Application

“…People with higher education usually use health applications at a young age and have a good income, so they can easily use them (Carroll et al, 2017). The satisfaction level of most users increases with the use of health applications (Haggag et al, 2022), several respondents who use the application show good acceptance of 78.4% (Al-Jallad et al, 2022), as well as with the application of applications in cardiology respondents benefit (Kulbayeva et al, 2022). Several applications can be freely accessed, with 73.7% free downloading (Ayyaswami et al, 2019).…”

The Perspective of mHealth in the Self-Assessment of the Parkinson’s Disease. Comment on Kalafati et al. Testing of Motor Coordination in Degenerative Neurological Diseases. Healthcare 2022, 10, 1948

“…I also believe that these systems are, so to speak, also pioneers based on the introduction of wearable tools for mHealth-based self-assessment for PD. Moreover, this is very motivating because mHealth seemed to be more concentrated only on specific diseases such as diabetes, heart, and lung diseases [ 2 , 3 , 4 ].…”