Introducing a Mobile System for the Early Detection of Cardiac Disorders as a Precaution from a Cardiologists' View - Evaluation of a Survey

This paper illustrates the results of a survey of practicing cardiologists that were asked about various aspects of a simplified telecardiology scenario using mobile devices. Such devices are becoming ubiquitous assets in everybody’s life. Their application in a healthcare environment aims not only at supporting the patients over traditional consultations but also maximizes the content of their health status information. The results of the survey may help application developers to focus their efforts of applications in a similar setting. 1 EHEALTH AND MHEALTH (Haas, 2006) defines eHealth as . the application of Internet and other related technologies in the health care industry to improve access, efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of clinical and business processes used by health care organizations, practitioners, patients, and consumers to improve the health status of patients. mHealth extends this notion by considering mobile actors (patients, health professionals, . . . ) and their environment. (Istepanian et al., 2006) simply define it as ”emerging mobile communication and network technology for health care”. Certain areas of eHealth like monitoring over distance can be greatly improved when considering ubiquitous mobile devices. (del Pozo et al., 2006) defines that potential needs should meet certain criteria so that: • eHealth services should be provided at any time and any place, depicting the need for efficient, ubiquitous and secure institutional care. • Efficient coordination tools should be provided to all health professionals dealing with each single patient, in order to allow the implementation of patient centered care. The recent advances in mobile technology like higher bandwidths or powerful smartphones with advanced features allow the creation of new medical applications that support both patients and doctors. A number of researchers have worked on the idea of assigning mobile devices to patients. It is possible to distinguish between the following three domains: 1. Mobile devices are used to help the patient by providing information. 2. Mobile devices are used to transmit physiological parameters. 3. Mobile devices are used to alert patients or medical professionals when certain physiological parameters become critical. The dialogue-based monitoring system in (Komninos and Stamou, 2006) aims at supporting elderly people in their preferred environment and can therefore be assigned to the first domain. The MOEBIUS project (Mobile extranet-based integrated user services) that integrates doctors and patients by submitting different physiological parameters (Fischer et al., 2006) can be considered as an application of the second domain. Similarly, (Leimeister et al., 2005) describes the usage of mobile devices in order to assist young cancer patients and concludes that the usage of such a system has a number of advantages: higher compliance of appointments with alerting functionality, higher data quality, less work for the doctor to prepare the documentation as well as less errors in the documentation. The use of context in a mobile healthcare scenario using the information groups Who, Where, When, Why and What has been described in (Savini et al., 2007). An example of the third domain collecting realtime electrocardiogram signals including basic arrhythmia detection with automatic alerting to a call center is illustrated in (Liszka et al., 2004). Their system architecture uses readily available commercial off-the-shelf components.