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Monitoring and Follow-up of Chronic Heart Failure: a Literature Review of eHealth Applications and Systems

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Abstract

In developed countries heart failure is one of the most important causes of death, followed closely by strokes and other cerebrovascular diseases. It is one of the major healthcare issues in terms of increasing number of patients, rate of hospitalizations and costs. The main aim of this paper is to present telemedicine applications for monitoring and follow-up of heart failure and to show how these systems can help reduce costs of administering heart failure. The search for e-health applications and systems in the field of telemonitoring of heart failure was pursued in IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, PubMed and Scopus systems between 2005 and the present time. This search was conducted between May and June 2015, and the articles deemed to be of most interest about treatment, prevention, self-empowerment and stabilization of patients were selected. Over 100 articles about telemonitoring of heart failure have been found in the literature reviewed since 2005, although the most interesting ones have been selected from the scientific standpoint. Many of them show that telemonitoring of patients with a high risk of heart failure is a measure that might help to reduce the risk of suffering from the disease. Following the review conducted, in can be stated that via the research articles analysed that telemonitoring systems can help to reduce the costs of administering heart failure and result in less re-hospitalization of patients.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dr. Pravin Amrut Pawar from Telemedicine Group of University of Twente, The Netherlands, Dr. Rahime Ceylan from Department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering of Selcuk University, Turkey, and Dr. Roberto Maestri from S. Maugeri Foundation, Italy for providing us with some figures in this article, such as Figs. 4, 5 and 6. Moreover, thanks to the Service of Cardiology of the Clinic University Hospital of Valladolid, Spain for the collaboration in this work.

This research has been partially supported by the European Commission and the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism under the project AAL-20125036 named “WetakeCare: ICT- based Solution for (Self-) Management of Daily Living”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Signal Theory and Communications, and Telematics Engineering, University of Valladolid, Paseo de Belén, 15, 47011, Valladolid, Spain

    Isabel de la Torre Díez & Miguel López-Coronado

  2. University of Deusto, Avenida de las Universidades 24, 48007, Bilbao, Spain

    Begoña Garcia-Zapirain & Amaia Méndez-Zorrilla

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  1. Isabel de la Torre Díez
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Correspondence to Isabel de la Torre Díez.

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de la Torre Díez, I., Garcia-Zapirain, B., Méndez-Zorrilla, A. et al. Monitoring and Follow-up of Chronic Heart Failure: a Literature Review of eHealth Applications and Systems. J Med Syst 40, 179 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-016-0537-y

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