BACKGROUND
Telehealth has been effective in managing cardiovascular diseases like stroke and heart failure and has shown promising results in managing patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD). However, more work is needed to fully understand the effect of telehealth based predictive modelling on the physical fitness of PAD patients.
OBJECTIVE
For this work, from the Keep Pace study were analyzed in depth to gain insights on temporal developments of patients’ conditions and to develop models to predict the patients’ total walking distance at study end. This could help to determine patients who are likely to benefit from the telehealth program and to continuously provide estimations to the patients as a motivating factor.
METHODS
The continuous telehealth data from 19 Fontaine stage II PAD patients granted insights in the increase of the total walking distance of the 6-minute walk tests as a measure for physical fitness, the steady decrease in the patients’ pain and the positive correlation between wellbeing and the total walking distance.
RESULTS
This work shows that the prediction of the total walking distance at study end works well at study baseline (root mean squared error of 30 meters; 7.04% of the mean total walking distance at study end of 425 meters) and continuously improved by adding further telehealth data. Future work should validate these findings in a larger cohort and in a prospective setting based on a clinical outcome.
CONCLUSIONS
We conclude that the prototypical trend estimation has great potential for an integration in the telehealth system to be used in future work to provide tailored patient specific advised based on these predictions. Continuous data from the telehealth system grant a deeper insight and a better understanding of the patients’ status concerning wellbeing and level of pain as well as their current physical fitness level and the progress towards reaching set goals.
CLINICALTRIAL
34-127 ex 21/22 1566-2021, ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT05619835