E-Pertension Study

: Proof Of Concept Of An Enablement Suite For The Self-Measurement Of Blood Pressure In Hypertensive Patients

Abstract

Background: Arterial hypertension is a major health concern. It affects more than a billion of people worldwide and is known as a “silent killer”, which impact the patients’ therapeutic adherence and thus their treatment efficiency. A potential way to improve the therapeutic adherence is the use of blood pressure self-measurement in combination with new technologies such as the mobile health (mhealth).
Aim: Proof of concept study aimed at developing and evaluating, in terms of functionality, feasibility and performance, a digital platform to improve the self-management of hypertensive patients.
Methods: The platform was developed in collaboration with the “Connected Health” team from Nokia Belgium. Once the platform was ready to be tested, 8 patients were recruited. The patients were added in the platform and they were given a blood pressure monitor device (Withings BPM-801) in order to perform their self-measurements. The devices are to be used with a smartphone application, the “Nokia Health Mate” and all the data collected in the smartphone application are sent to the platform, where a healthcare professional can manage them. The patients have to take their blood pressure twice a week during two months (8 weeks) and they will receive reminders, warnings or encouraging messages according to their blood pressure or measurements performed or not.
Analysis: The platform was shown to be functional and efficient with 187 out of 223 measures correctly transferred (83,85%). A database issue occurred at the initiation but was rapidly corrected and another issue occurred at the end of the study but was not related to the platform itself. The patient compliance to the protocol was relatively high with 223 out of 252 measures done (88,5%). Regarding the blood pressure data, the study sample was too small to see significant differences but some slight changes can be seen in several patients. For the feasibility, 7 out of 8 patients found this system very helpful and were ready to extend this practice.
Conclusion: The platform need to be more robust in order to prevent the issues encountered and need some slight adaptation but it was showed to be functional, efficient and useful for the patients. A further study might then be envisaged in order to test the potential benefit in poor or non-adherent hypertensive patient.

Date of Award	23 Jan 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Marc Tomas (Supervisor)