Feasibility of a wearable self-management application for patients with COPD at home: a pilot study.

BACKGROUND: Among people with COPD, smartphone and wearable technology may provide an effective method to improve care at home by supporting, encouraging, and sustaining self-management. The current study was conducted to determine if patients with COPD will use a dedicated smartphone and smartwatch app to help manage their COPD and to determine the effects on their self-management. METHODS: We developed a COPD self-management application for smartphones and smartwatches. Participants were provided with the app on a smartphone and a smartwatch, as well as a cellular data plan and followed for 6 months. We measured usage of the different smartphone app functions. For the primary outcome, we examined the change in self-management from baseline to the end of follow up. Secondary outcomes include changes in self-efficacy, quality of life, and COPD disease control. RESULTS: Thirty-four patients were enrolled and followed. Mean age was 69.8 years, and half of the participants were women. The most used functions were recording steps through the smartwatch, entering a daily symptom questionnaire, checking oxygen saturation, and performing breathing exercises. There was no significant difference in the primary outcome of change in self-management after use of the app or in overall total scores of health-related quality of life, disease control or self-efficacy. CONCLUSION: We found older patients with COPD would engage with a COPD smartphone and smartwatch application, but this did not result in improved self-management. More research is needed to determine if a smartphone and smartwatch application can improve self-management in people with COPD. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.Gov NCT03857061, First Posted February 27, 2019.

Remote COPD Severity and Exacerbation Detection Using Heart Rate and Activity Data Measured from a Wearable Device.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the leading causes of human mortality worldwide. Traditionally, estimating COPD severity has been done in controlled clinical conditions using cough sounds, respiration, and heart rate variability, with the latter reporting insights on the autonomic dysfunction caused by the disease. Advancements in remote monitoring and wearable device technologies, in turn, have allowed for remote COPD monitoring in daily life conditions. In this study, we explore the potential for predicting COPD severity and exacerbation using a low-cost wearable device that measures heart rate and activity data. We collected smartwatch sensor data from 35 COPD patients over a period of three months. Our evaluation shows that future trajectory of the disease can be predicted using only the first few days of continuous unobtrusive wearable data collected from COPD patients. Using features extracted from wearable device an Isolation Forest was able to predict exacerbation with an area under curve (AUC) 0.69 thus showing improvement over a random choice classifier.

Talk2Me: Automated linguistic data collection for personal assessment.

Language is one the earliest capacities affected by cognitive change. To monitor that change longitudinally, we have developed a web portal for remote linguistic data acquisition, called Talk2Me, consisting of a variety of tasks. In order to facilitate research in different aspects of language, we provide baselines including the relations between different scoring functions within and across tasks. These data can be used to augment studies that require a normative model; for example, we provide baseline classification results in identifying dementia. These data are released publicly along with a comprehensive open-source package for extracting approximately two thousand lexico-syntactic, acoustic, and semantic features. This package can be applied arbitrarily to studies that include linguistic data. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive publicly available software for extracting linguistic features. The software includes scoring functions for different tasks.

Feasibility of Using a Smartwatch to Intensively Monitor Patients With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Prospective Cohort Study.

BACKGROUND: Acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are associated with accelerated decline in lung function, diminished quality of life, and higher mortality. Proactively monitoring patients for early signs of an exacerbation and treating them early could prevent these outcomes. The emergence of affordable wearable technology allows for nearly continuous monitoring of heart rate and physical activity as well as recording of audio which can detect features such as coughing. These signals may be able to be used with predictive analytics to detect early exacerbations. Prior to full development, however, it is important to determine the feasibility of using wearable devices such as smartwatches to intensively monitor patients with COPD. OBJECTIVE: We conducted a feasibility study to determine if patients with COPD would wear and maintain a smartwatch consistently and whether they would reliably collect and transmit sensor data. METHODS: Patients with COPD were recruited from 3 hospitals and were provided with a smartwatch that recorded audio, heart rate, and accelerations. They were asked to wear and charge it daily for 90 days. They were also asked to complete a daily symptom diary. At the end of the study period, participants were asked what would motivate them to regularly use a wearable for monitoring of their COPD. RESULTS: Of 28 patients enrolled, 16 participants completed the full 90 days. The average age of participants was 68.5 years, and 36% (10/28) were women. Survey, heart rate, and activity data were available for an average of 64.5, 65.1, and 60.2 days respectively. Technical issues caused heart rate and activity data to be unavailable for approximately 13 and 17 days, respectively. Feedback provided by participants indicated that they wanted to actively engage with the smartwatch and receive feedback about their activity, heart rate, and how to better manage their COPD. CONCLUSIONS: Some patients with COPD will wear and maintain smartwatches that passively monitor audio, heart rate, and physical activity, and wearables were able to reliably capture near-continuous patient data. Further work is necessary to increase acceptability and improve the patient experience.