Monitoring the Physical Activity of Patients Suffering From Peripheral Arterial Disease

Monitoring the Physical Activity of Patients Suffering From Peripheral Arterial Disease

Dennis Paulino (INESC TEC, Portugal & University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal), Arsénio Reis (INESC TEC, Portugal & University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal), Joao Barroso (INESC TEC, Portugal & University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal) and Hugo Paredes (INESC TEC, Portugal & University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal)
Copyright: © 2018 |Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-5270-3.ch009

Abstract

The peripheral arterial disease (PAD) is characterized by leg pain during walking, and a recommended treatment for this disease is to perform supervised physical activity. In this chapter, a system that monitories the physical activity containing one application for smartwatch, one application for smartphone, and a back-end webservice is presented. The applications collect heart rate, GPS locations, step count, and altitude data. The methodology used for the development of the system was based on the agile method with the production of prototypes. In this chapter, four development cycles, which cover the users' and researchers' needs, are presented. In this work, the main objective is to evaluate the current mobile technologies on the physical activity data collection and the development of a system that assists the users to maintain an active life.
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In PAD, the recommended treatment is the performing of supervised physical activity, which normally is done in hospital environment. The study conducted by Regenstein et al. (1997), concluded that patients which entered in a hospital exercise program to perform physical activity had better results comparing to patients who perform physical activity unsupervised at home. To avoid the patient going to the hospital to perform supervised exercise, it is necessary to allow the health professionals to supervise the patient´s physical activity at home. There are some studies that approaches this problem, presenting systems that collects health data or physical activity data.

The study conducted by Fokkenrood et al. (2014) was based on a validation of an activity monitor that stores offline the step count and the type of activity performed from the patient (e.g. sitting, resting, locomotion) to a maximum time of seven days. This activity monitor could be useful to help health professionals evaluate the activity performed by the PAD professionals, but has the disadvantage that the patient has the responsibility to send the collected data to the health professional. In this study the target population is patients with PAD.

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