Digital Platform to Continuously Monitor Patients Using a Smartwatch: Preliminary Report

Abstract

Background Monitoring vital signs such as oximetry, blood pressure, and heart rate is important to follow the evolution of patients. Smartwatches are a revolution in medicine allowing the collection of such data in a continuous and organic way. However, it is still a challenge to make this information available to health care professionals to make decisions during clinical follow-up. Objective This study aims to build a digital solution that displays vital sign data from smartwatches, collected remotely, continuously, reliably, and from multiple users, with trigger warnings when abnormal results are identified. Methods This is a single-center prospective study following the guidelines “Evaluating digital health products” from the UK Health Security Agency. A digital platform with 3 different applications was created to capture and display data from the mobile phones of volunteers with smartwatches. We selected 80 volunteers who were followed for 24 weeks each, and the synchronization interval between the smartwatch and digital solution was recorded for each vital sign collected. Results In 14 weeks of project progress, we managed to recruit 80 volunteers, with 68 already registered in the digital solution. More than 2.8 million records have already been collected, without system downtime. Less than 5% of continuous heart rate measurements (bpm) were synchronized within 2 hours. However, approximately 70% were synchronized in less than 24 hours, and 90% were synchronized in less than 119 hours. Conclusions The digital solution is working properly in its role of displaying data collected from smartwatches. Vital sign values are being monitored by the research team as part of the monitoring of volunteers. Although the digital solution proved unsuitable for monitoring urgent events, it is more than suitable for use in outpatient clinical use. This digital solution, which is based on cloud technology, can be applied in the future for telemonitoring in regions lacking health care professionals. Accuracy and reliability studies still need to be performed at the end of the 24-week follow-up.