Mobile app to monitor heart failure
Dhadkan is a mobile app for remotely monitoring and providing medical assistance to the patients with heart problems. It reduces the risks of sudden heart failure by automatically sending a notification.
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee is one of the institutes of national importance in engineering, basic and applied research and in the area of higher technological education. From conception, the Institute has played a key role to provide technical know-how and manpower as well as the pursuit of research. It is ranked one of the best technological institutions globally and has been a contributor in every sector of technological revolution.
It is again shown by the fact that the institute has been ranked first in Citations among every institute in the country as indicated by the Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings of 2018 & the institutes rank third among the IITs in India.
Indian Institute of Technology IIT Roorkee has come up with a mobile app, named Dhadkan, that is for rescuing lives of those affected by heart failure by providing medical assistance and remotely monitoring.
The Translational Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Laboratory of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee developed the application. The application simply collects data of the patient (an interval that is desired) on heart rate, weight, and blood pressure and then sends it to the responsible caregiver (a nurse, paramedic or doctor) that oversees the patient when the patient registers for the first time.
The app also offers a 2-way kind of communication between the doctors and their patients. In addition, the patients are free to transmit ECG reports to their doctor (whenever they are required). The good thing with this app, it sends a notification automatically to both the patient and the doctor, in case there is any drastic variation in the patient’s data showing a likelihood of serious heart failure.
It is also said that the app not only does away with the need for monitoring manually every patient on their own by the practitioner but also assists them in proactively advising on the precautionary measures during the period of treatment.
The app is available on Google Play Store for free to be used by the patients and the doctors and it was created by the Indian Institute Technology’s Computational Biology team, led by Sharma Deepak, the assistant professor, the Department of Biotechnology, in conjunction with Gopichand ran and Sandeep Seth from New Delhi’s All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
Looking at its substance, the Dhadkan app is of great help to patients that live in far-off areas & can’t come every time to the tertiary care medical facilities. Named ‘Dhadkan’, the mobile application will be of great benefit to India that has around 10 million patients who have a great risk of their heart failure.
The application can be accessed free with no charges that are involved to take advantage of this app. About a third of the patients admitted, there is a likeliness to be admitted again or just die in the next three to six months
The application will be employed in conducting a random regulated trial on 100 patients with heart failure at All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to validate the utility & to advise on any new features that could be incorporated.
Developed by Chaturvedi Somesh, a B. Tech biotechnology 4th-year student, and Srivastava Shreya, a biotechnology PhD 1st-year student, ‘Dhadkan’ has most definitely come as a blessing to all the heart failure patients. The mobile application has been created simple and easy to use so those patients from the rural areas can benefit as well.
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