Supervised training with wireless monitoring of ECG, blood pressure and oxygen-saturation in cardiac patients

Abstract

We have developed a tele-rehabilitation application for training cardiac patients. It uses a modified ergometer bicycle with a set of wireless sensors. While the patient is exercising, the ECG, blood pressure and oxygen-saturation are monitored constantly and automatically. If sensor values exceed pre-defined thresholds, the patient receives an alarm. As a result the training will either be stopped or continued at a reduced load, depending on the severity of the alarm. To measure user acceptance, we introduced the system to 13 members of staff and four patients, who trained on the system every day during their stay in hospital. A total of 39 training sessions were completed. In 27% of the exercise sessions an ECG connection could not be established and in 23%, blood pressure measurement failed. However, there were no failures to measure oxygen saturation. The overall acceptance of the patient's graphical user interface (GUI) was excellent. The doctor's GUI with its functions received an overall score of 1.5 on a scale of 1 to 4 (usefulness 1.6, usability 1.3 and operability 1.6). The SAPHIRE tele-rehabilitation system operated properly and was well accepted by patients and doctors.

USER CENTERED DESIGN PROCESS OF OSAMI-D - Developing User Interfaces for a Remote Ergometer Training Application

“…The project OSAMI-D follows an iterative UCD process for designing the user interfaces. We already evaluated the user interfaces of the precursor project SAPHIRE (Busch et al, 2009) which was more technically driven and therefore had some lack in user interface consistency. Using this results we developed paper based mockups of the OSAMI-D user interfaces and presented these to patients in the Schüchtermann clinic (the clinical representative partner in the OSAMI-D project) who attended cardiac rehabilitation at that time and which were familiar with similar hospital based systems.…”

OSAMI-D: An open service platform for healthcare monitoring applications

“…The application scenario for the OSAMI-D project is a remote monitoring system enabling cardiac patients to carry out home-based rehabilitation exercise under medical surveillance [14]. Before patients are permitted to perform their rehabilitation training at home, they will carry out an inpatient training phase at the rehabilitation clinic.…”

Designing context aware user interfaces for online exercise training supervision

“…E.g. the SAPHIRE-Project [6] that used a bicycle ergometer for in-situ training supervision or the ongoing project HeartCycle [9] that also integrates online exercise supervision into its platform.…”

“…The first prototype is based on the user interfaces from the SAPHIRE-Project [6]. A questionnaire with clinic personal as potential users of the system was created and processed focusing on typical tasks, operational procedures and requirements of the user groups.…”