Borja Martínez-Pérez*, Department of Signal Theory and Communications, and Telematics Engineering. University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain Isabel de la Torre-Díez, Department of Signal Theory and Communications, and Telematics Engineering. University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain Miguel López-Coronado, Department of Signal Theory and Communications, and Telematics Engineering. University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain Fernando del Pozo-Crespo, Department of Medicine, Dermatology and Toxicology. University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain Jesús Herreros-González, Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Health Technology, 2IByTS. Catholic University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain Carlos de Castro-Lozano, Department of Informatics and Numeric Analysis. University of Cordoba, Córdoba, Spain Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Mobile & Tablet Health Applications Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-05-27

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Background: Chronic diseases are a major problem in health care, and concretely, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the deadliest diseases with 17.3 million individuals dead in 2008, which represented 30% of all deaths worldwide. The authors developed a market research of cardiology apps in Google Play and the App Store and they found 710 apps related to cardiology. These apps have different objectives and, in general, they have proved to influence positively on heart diseases. The majority of those apps are heart monitors, medical calculators, informative guides and apps to help with ECG interpretation, but only 1 app for heart conditions management and one for heart rehabilitation were found.
Objective: In light of the results of this market research, the main objective is to develop a new and innovative app for the self-management of heart diseases due to the lack of this type of apps.
Methods: The process of the creation of the app, named CardioManager, consisted of three stages: design, development and validation. The app was designed for Android because it is the most extended mobile operating system worldwide, the implementation was done by using Android Software Development Kit (SDK) and the app was validated using different devices with a wide range of screen sizes.
Results: CardioManager focus on the most common cardiology diseases based on the experience of three cardiologists that help the authors with the design of CardioManager: ischemic cardiopathy, hypertension, valvular heart disease, diabetes and auricular fibrillation. The app is divided into three sections. The first is an informative section with medical information about the diseases that will help the patients to understand their illness; and a patient guide in order to inform the users about best practices, prohibitions and life style they should adopt. The second is a section to record the user’s activities (good and bad for their conditions) and health measures in order to act in consequence with them. The last section is used for registering the users’ medications and the hours that they should have them, offering the possibility to establish alarms to warn them. Besides, CardioManager allows the creation of a medical record of the user, whose data will be protected by encryption mechanisms. Additionally, all the data stored by CardioManager are kept only in the mobile device and are not sent to third parties, so the privacy is guaranteed.
Conclusion: An app for the self-management of heart diseases has been developed to improve the patients’ conditions by motivating them to do healthy activities and avoid bad habits, taking their medications punctually and improving their knowledge about their conditions. It can even contribute to save their lives in case of emergencies such as an infarct, since the emergency staff can use the information stored in the medical record in order to apply the best treatment. From an economical perspective, the app can mean significant saves in the health budgets of the countries since it can avoid hospitalizations derived from incorrect intakes or bad lifestyle habits.