Dhadkan mobile app to save lives of heart failure patients

New Delhi: In a major development that may prove to be a great help for patients suffering from cardiovascular ailments, the IIT Roorkee has developed a mobile app christened as Dhadkan for saving lives of heart failure patients through remotely monitoring and providing medical assistance.

The app - developed by the Computational Biology and Translational Bioinformatics Laboratory of the IIT Roorkee - collects patient's data (at any desired interval) on blood pressure, heart rate, and weight, and transmits it to the authorised caregiver (a doctor, nurse or paramedic) who is linked to the patient during the initial registration.

While talking to Millennium Post over phone, assistant professor Deepak Sharma said, "The app is very user-friendly and it can be downloaded from Google Play Store for free. The app works on two-way communication between doctors and patients. Both the doctor and patient have to have the app on their smartphones."

"In case, a patient moves from one city to other, he/she may change the doctor and get the assistance from new doctor in their own city as the moment a patient get registered with a new doctor through the app, the cardiologist would get all the medical history of that patient," Sharma said, adding that the app would be used for conducting a randomised control trial on 100 heart failure patients at AIIMS to validate its utility.

Sharma further said that the data of the patients registered with the app would be fully secured as it would be stored on the server of IIT-Roorkee.

"The patients have the freedom to send ECG reports to the doctor (if needed). Most importantly, it automatically sends a notification to both the doctor and the patient, in case of any drastic changes in the patient's data indicating a possibility of imminent heart failure," Sharma said.

The app was developed by the IIT's Computational Biology group, led by Deepak Sharma, assistant professor, Department of Biotechnology, in collaboration with Sandeep Seth and Gopichandran from All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi.