'Dhadkan' app to help caregivers know about vital data of heart patients

A smartphone application 'Dhadkan' has been developed by doctors at Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), which will help doctors and other caregivers know about a patient's irregular heartbeat and help prevent heart failure at an early stage.

Dr Sandeep Seth, Professor, Department of Cardiology, AIIMS, said the app has been tested on several patients and has produced excellent results.

'Dhadkan' collects data on blood pressure, heart rate, and weight, and transmits it once a week to the authorised caregiver (a nurse, a doctor or paramedic) who is connected to the patient during the initial registration. The app is available on Google Play Store.

After downloading the app, patients can register on its website, along with their caregiver.

After this, the patient will need to enter his/her blood pressure, heart rate and weight once a week on the app.

Once the patient uploads the information, it will be transmitted to the caregiver as an SMS. If the patient does not carry a smartphone, children who are adept at using smartphones could be encouraged to help the patient.

Heart failure is starting to reach alarming proportions in India. Around one-third of patients after admission for heart failure are likely to be re-admitted or die in the next three to six months.

Patients with heart failure in the developed countries are often linked to their doctors through a number of web-enabled telemonitoring devices and heart failure management services.

Telemonitoring of such patients after discharge allows picking up of adverse events before they occur and helps improve their quality of life.

Dr Sandeep Seth said: "After the launch of this app, we conducted a validation study, in which patients were randomly assigned to a nurse-led heart failure program, which included the smartphone app as the monitoring tool, or a control group."

Seth stated that the nurse and doctors in the program intervene whenever there are inappropriate blood pressure fluctuations or heart rate fluctuations in the patient or an increase in weight within the week-long period.

Dr Seth claimed that at the end of the study, the intervention arm using Dhadkan showed improvements in quality of life. "With technology being given a push by the government, cardiologists in India cannot be far behind, and in this issue, we cover a number of technological advances which aid the cardiologist," Seth said.

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