mHealth – medicine using mobile communication
Mobile Healthcare in action
Maxim Russo, <url>What is modern technology in medicine?
These are high-precision tomographs that accurately determine the location of the tumor in the patient's body. These are genetic diagnostics and genetic therapy. This is the "computer design" of chemical formulas of new drugs. These are prosthetic hands controlled by the brain, and implants that restore people's vision.
But speaking about these truly amazing achievements, we often forget that in addition to treating the disease, the tasks of medicine include monitoring the state of health, monitoring. And here, too, there is a place for new technologies.
Monitoring of a person's condition is necessary in many cases. To trace whether the disease has returned in those who have already been treated. To notice dangerous symptoms in people from risk groups in time. And just to control the state of the body for the sake of prevention. You can, of course, put a person in the hospital and entangle them with a web of sensors, but it is unlikely that he will agree to this without serious reasons. Therefore, wearable sensors and remote monitoring are needed.
This area is actively developing, and the demand for it is growing even faster. In 2012 and 2013, the Consumer Electronics Association of the United States conducted surveys of Americans regarding wearable devices that monitor their health. If in 2012 only 3% of respondents expressed their intention to purchase such electronic devices, then a year later they became 13%, and 9% already used such devices. At the same time, the devices themselves are becoming more and more perfect. They are becoming more and more miniature, so that they can be easily placed on the body without interfering with everyday life, and more skillful, able to fix a larger number of parameters.
But the data collected by sensors, wearable or stationary (for example, devices for measuring pressure, pulse or taking a cardiogram) still need to be delivered to the doctor. This is proposed to be done by systems that have received the general name mHealth, or mobile healthcare. They allow you to collect data on mobile phones, tablet computers and PDAs and forward them to the addressee. It should be noted that mobile healthcare covers not only medical monitoring systems, but also, for example, remote provision of medical care (telemedicine) or patient access to his electronic medical history. There are even programs that send a reminder to the patient's cell phone about the need to take the medicine on time.
Robert Istepanian, who proposed the term mHealth in 2005, defined it as the use of "the development of mobile communications and network technologies for healthcare needs." In 2010, at the summit of the National Institutes of Health of the United States dedicated to mobile healthcare, the definition was adopted: "the provision of medical services using mobile communication devices."
Analysts say that the volume of the mobile healthcare market in 2015 in the United States will amount to $ 6.9 billion, and worldwide – $ 23 billion. According to Berg Insight, in 2012, about 2.8 million patients worldwide used home monitoring systems. Moreover, this indicator did not include devices associated with mobile phones or tablets, but only devices such as wearable heart monitors with a built-in modem. The number of devices using cellular communication increased from 0.73 million in 2011 to 1.03 million in 2012, and is projected to reach 7.10 million in 2017 (and, taking into account other systems, will exceed 9 million). 500 million people will use various medical applications for smartphones in 2015. An important factor influencing the demand for mobile healthcare in developed countries is the aging of the population, because the health status of older people especially needs constant monitoring.
In addition to achieving explicit goals (monitoring the patient's condition outside the hospital, preliminary diagnosis), mobile healthcare, as it turned out, achieves another goal. According to the staff of the Faculty of Fundamental Medicine of Moscow State University, "World experience shows that with the beginning of monitoring of any indicator, the patient begins to pay more attention to his health, tries not to provoke complications of the disease, in other words, becomes a more responsible patient. There is evidence that even monitoring the patient's motor activity using a simple pedometer is accompanied by an increase in activity by 2-2.5 thousand steps per day."
Unfortunately, Russia, having already a sufficient level of mobile communication development, is not among the leaders in the field of mobile healthcare. Among those who seek to overcome this gap is Fruit MD, a resident of the information technology cluster of the Skolkovo Foundation, which demonstrated its products at the startup bazaar as part of Startup Village.
The first developments were presented by her back in 2006 at the World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. Then it was a device combining a smartphone with electrocardiogram sensors, blood pressure, heart rate and blood oxygen saturation. The device fixing the ECG included a frequency modulator. The smartphone received an ECG-modulated audio signal, demodulated it using a special program, determining the main characteristics of the ECG, displayed the ECG curve on the display and transmitted the data in digital form to the server.
Now the company is developing a "Mobile Diagnostic Device" consisting of a set of wireless medical sensors, a smartphone that collects and analyzes data, and a cloud-based software platform that performs diagnostics and provides them to a doctor, patient or his relatives. The sensors may include not only ECG recorders, blood pressure and pulse oximeter, but also, for example, a glucose meter that determines the level of sugar in the blood, or a peak fluometer that records the peak exhalation rate. The latter indicator is important, for example, for the diagnosis and control of asthma treatment.
This technology allows you not only to monitor the state of your own health or the health of family members, but also in a number of cases to automatically diagnose certain diseases. This is the main goal of developers: not only to collect data, but also to automatically analyze them and formulate a conclusion. For example, the CardiaCare module, developed by Fruit MD specialists, can automatically detect cardiac arrhythmias based on ECG monitoring. By the way, CardiaCare became the winner of the Russian Mobile VAS Awards'2012 competition in the mobile service category.
The doctor can use a mobile diagnostic device to monitor the patient's condition outside the hospital and adjust the course of treatment at the right moments. Also, a mobile diagnostic device will help in organizing a healthy lifestyle, in particular, in determining the optimal level of physical activity.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru09.06.2014