I-Corps: Mobile HealthLink Wearable Remote Health Monitoring System

Wichita State University, Wichita KS

Investigators

Abstract

Remote health monitoring is a rapidly growing field with potential for improved care and reduced hospitalizations and outpatient visits for people in home-care or community-care environments. To reduce the cost to health providers while enabling real-time caregiver/patient interaction, the proposed technology (Mobile HealthLink) provides an application and online service using an affordable smartwatch. The health monitoring application and service provide a means for healthcare providers to assess and track the health of clients remotely through qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. The smartwatch health application was conceived for the growing population of people over the age of 65, of whom 80% suffer from at least one chronic illness and require constant care. Mobile HealthLink provides an online management portal to allow Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) organizations, home-care facilities, and primary caregivers to better serve their clients. The proposed project will generate a product that provides affordability, user-friendliness, and customization currently unavailable by other systems on the market. The goal of this project is to enhance communication between healthcare providers and the people they serve so improved quality of healthcare can be provided. The initial target population is people over the age of 65 years who live in their homes and receive healthcare from PACE organizations. To this end, one fundamental component of Mobile HealthLink is the ability to practice preventative healthcare, especially in rural populations, by remotely collecting, storing, analyzing, and responding to qualitative and quantitative health status information. Because qualitative data in the form of patient feedback is vital to healthcare providers' efforts to provide quality care, Mobile HealthLink incorporates the ability to create and send qualitative health queries to the patient's smartwatch, or other electronic device, by way of an internet portal. With this feature, healthcare providers can adjust the patient's health regimen based on both qualitative and quantitative health data. A second fundamental component of Mobile HealthLink is its scalability. The Mobile HealthLink platform can be used to follow the health status of thousands of an organization's subscribers or that of an individual family member. These design components and Mobile HealthLink's compatibility with existing consumer smartwatches, smart phones and tablets will make the product accessible to a larger population and enhance the potential to improve healthcare.