Whether they need to simply shed a few pounds, or are recovering from a near-miss heart attack, many people are under their doctor’s strict orders to get more exercise. Physical activity prescriptions have become a de facto medical intervention, a structured counterattack to the sedentary American lifestyle and fat-fueled diet.
And now, doctors may be able to keep tabs on how well their patients have heeded their advice, even when they’re miles apart, thanks to a new remote monitoring device from Alive Technologies.
There’s no clearer example of the divide between our intentions and actions than the case of a person starting a mandated exercise routine. Today’s scheduled gym time easily becomes tomorrow’s prolonged procrastination when our minds unwisely rationalize that our daily choices have little effect on our long-term health.
For dire conditions, like those involving the heart where the exercise prescription is crucial, hospitals and health clinics may provide cardiac rehabilitation -- an outpatient service much like physical therapy, where physicians or licensed exercise physiologists design a custom activity program and monitor the patient’s progress.
But people much prefer to get their exercise at home. After all, who wants to have to drive to the clinic just to have someone watch you march along on the treadmill?
Doctors are sometime reluctant to allow patients to exercise on their own, in case something goes awry, like a potentially life-threatening irregular heartbeat. Alive Technologies, a company based in Queensland, Australia, is addressing these concerns with their new Heart and Activity Monitor, which may jointly satisfy the rigor that physicians need, as well as the freedom that patients desire.
In a paper published this month in the journal PLoS ONE, the company tapped researchers from the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology to devise a proof-of-concept study that showed medical professionals can accurately monitor a person’s prescribed exercise routine even when the patient was not in the clinic.
Alive’s device recorded the entire electrocardiogram (ECG) signal -- the blips and spikes that show the electrical activity of the heart -- along with activity-based accelerometer readings and the current GPS location, then wirelessly streamed the data to a qualified health care practitioner, who could make personalized adjustments to exercise regimens or address a medical emergency, if need be.
The study followed six patients (most of them male) that differed in age by just 25 years -- a group that leaves us guessing about how well this device will work across a more diverse population. And while the participants of the study were encouraged by the technology, the device itself suffered from technical reliability issues on roughly 20 percent of the trials.
Clearly, there’s room for improvement. But even in this small pilot study, the device proved some worth: On two separate occasions, the researchers noted distinct abnormalities in a patient’s ECG and consulted with a cardiologist. While the cardiac events turned out to be benign, the fact that such subtleties could be picked up with remote monitoring holds much promise for the tech. Had a more serious medical emergency transpired, the researchers could have summoned an ambulance to the scene using the transmitted GPS data.
And since we now look to monitor everything on our mobile devices, from reading the news to checking friends’ Facebook updates, it makes sense that our personal health would follow suit.
*Citation: Worringham, C., Rojek, A., & Stewart, I. (2011) Development and Feasibility of a Smartphone, ECG and GPS Based System for Remotely Monitoring Exercise in Cardiac Rehabilitation. PLoS ONE, 6(2), e14669. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0014669
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Image: mahidoodi/Flickr/Creative Commons
