Towards a mobile system for hypertensive outpatients' treatment adherence improvement

Abstract

Covering more than a third of the population, arterial hypertension is a debilitating disease resulting in the adverse effect on the physical and emotional state of the patient and, hence, exerting the negative influence on the patient health- related quality of life. Treatment of hypertension involves the use of specific drug therapy along with a modification of a lifestyle and a diet over a long-term period. This, in turn, leads to the low adherence to the treatment among the ambulatory patients and, as a consequence, increases the chances of the hypertension-related complications, including the risk of sudden cardiac death. To address the problem of low adherence, we have previously proposed the mobile personal monitoring and assisting system constructed on the principles of smart spaces. The system relies on joint processing of both objective and subjective health measures accumulated in semantic ontology-driven storage enabling the construction of the personalized assisting services. In this paper, we extend the approach putting into consideration behaviour activities and interventions. Moreover, we propose the adherence assessment method based on the variety of user engagement measures, which also can be divided into subjective questionnaire-based measures, and objective metrics based on behaviour analysis and mobile app analytics.

Keywords

• mHealth
• hypertension adherence
• smart healthcare services