These patients can look to eHealth and mHealth for help. Both practices enable patients to collect their own health data, share it with their doctor via a secure connection and use video chat or phone to talk with the specialist about their care. Patients only have to make a physical visit in rare cases. Here’s the catch: cardiology data is more complex than blood sugar levels and blood pressure that many patients routinely measure at home.
You need an ECG test to diagnose cardiac arrhythmias, for example, as cardiac rhythm disturbances can prompt blood to pool in the heart and cause clots to form, which can travel to the brain, where they can cause a stroke. But if arrhythmias are detected, they can be effectively treated to prevent clots from forming.
Today, patients must wear a 24-hour ECG monitoring device that measures and records the heart’s activity. This is quite uncomfortable and restrictive. Ever-evolving smartphone technology and the CE-marked and FDA approved FibriCheck smartphone app can help in this case. The latter uses the camera of a smartphone and is based on photoplethysmography, which measures the volumetric change of the heart by measuring light transmission. The FibriCheck app illuminates the fingertip with the flash of the smartphone camera and measures light absorption over time: light absorption varies with every heartbeat as each beat pumps blood through the body and the subcutaneous capillaries of the fingertip. When they increase in thickness with a heartbeat, they absorb more light, while less light is absorbed between heartbeats. The app measures this fluctuation consecutively for 60 seconds and can suggest a disturbed heart rhythm.