Digital health technology to support care and improve outcomes of chronic kidney disease patients: as a case illustration, the Withings toolkit health sensing tools

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a major burden in dialysis-dependent chronic kidney disease (CKD5D) patients. Several factors contribute to this vulnerability including traditional risk factors such as age, gender, life style and comorbidities, and non-traditional ones as part of dialysis-induced systemic stress. In this context, it appears of utmost importance to bring a closer attention to CVD monitoring in caring for CKD5D patients to ensure early and appropriate intervention for improving their outcomes. Interestingly, new home-used, self-operated, connected medical devices offer convenient and new tools for monitoring in a fully automated and ambulatory mode CKD5D patients during the interdialytic period. Sensoring devices are installed with WiFi or Bluetooth. Some devices are also available in a cellular version such as the Withings Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) solution. These devices analyze the data and upload the results to Withings HDS (Hybrid data security) platform servers. Data visualization can be viewed by the patient using the Withings Health Mate application on a smartphone, or with a web interface. Health Care Professionals (HCP) can also visualize patient data via the Withings web-based RPM interface. In this narrative essay, we analyze the clinical potential of pervasive wearable sensors for monitoring ambulatory dialysis patients and provide an assessment of such toolkit digital medical health devices currently available on the market. These devices offer a fully automated, unobtrusive and remote monitoring of main vital functions in ambulatory subjects. These unique features provide a multidimensional assessment of ambulatory CKD5D patients covering most physiologic functionalities, detecting unexpected disorders (i.e., volume overload, arrhythmias, sleep disorders) and allowing physicians to judge patient’s response to treatment and recommendations. In the future, the wider availability of such pervasive health sensing and digital technology to monitor patients at an affordable cost price will improve the personalized management of CKD5D patients, so potentially resulting in improvements in patient quality of life and survival.