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| HONEY BEE SECTION: INNOVATIONS FOR THE HEART |
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| Year : 2016 | Volume
: 2
| Issue : 3 | Page : 141 |
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“Dhadkan,” an indigenous smartphone app for heart failure patients
Sandeep Seth
Department of Cardiology, AIIMS, New Delhi, India
| Date of Web Publication | 2-Mar-2017 |
Correspondence Address:
Sandeep Seth
Department of Cardiology, AIIMS, New Delhi
India
 Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None  | Check |
DOI: 10.4103/jpcs.jpcs_6_17
How to cite this article:
Seth S. “Dhadkan,” an indigenous smartphone app for heart failure patients. J Pract Cardiovasc Sci 2016;2:141 |
Heart failure is starting to reach alarming proportions in India. Almost one third of patients after admission for heart failure are likely to get readmitted or die in the next 3–6 months. Telemonitoring these patients after discharge allows picking up adverse events before they happen and improving the quality of life in these patients. Western patients with heart failure are often linked to their doctors through a number of web-enabled telemonitoring devices and heart failure management services. “Dhadkan” is a very simple smartphone app which collects data on blood pressure, heart rate, and weight, and transmits it once a week to the authorized caregiver (a nurse or a doctor or paramedic) who is linked to the patient during the initial registration. It is available on Google Play Store [Figure 1]. After downloading, the patient registers on the site. The caregiver also has to register. After this, the patient will enter the blood pressure, heart rate, and weight, once a week on the app screen. Once he/she saves the information, the information is transmitted to the caregiver as a simple SMS. If the patient does not carry a smartphone, we encourage the children to help the patient as we find that children usually carry a smartphone. | Figure 1: Dhadkan - A smartphone app, available on Google Play Store for heart failure patients.
Click here to view |
After the launch of this app, we conducted a validation study, in which patients were randomly assigned to a nurse-led heart failure program, which included this smartphone app as the monitoring tool, or a control group. The nurse and doctors in the program intervene whenever there are inappropriate blood pressure fluctuations or heart rate fluctuations in the patient or an increase in weight over the past week.
At the end of the study, the intervention arm using Dhadkan showed improvements in quality of life.
Financial support and sponsorship
Nil.
Conflicts of interest
There are no conflicts of interest.
[Figure 1]
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