Self Management and Remote Monitoring of Heart Failure and Chronic Obstructive Airways Disease using a Smart Phone Application

Patients randomised to the intervention group enter their symptoms daily for 30 days on the smart phone application. The application used is called Mentegram. The symptoms that are questioned are different for heart failure and COPD. The estimated time each day to enter the symptoms is 2 minutes. A deterioration in symptom control results in an immediate automatic prompt to contact their General Practitioner. Patients who do not report having contacted their GP within 24 hours then contacted via the research team using telephone to determine whether the patient has seen/is planning to see their GP, if they have not made contact with their GP and why. The hospital research team will look at the patient details and form an individualised response which includes, but is not limited to, alerting the patient’s nominated GP and their hospital treating team Additionally patients who do not enter their daily report are contacted via telephone to perform a welfare check. Weekly links to self-management education tutorials will be sent to the participants through the application. This education material consists of links to publicly available education material from the Lung Foundation Australia (lungfoundation.com.au), the Heart Foundation (www.heartfoundation.org.au) and WA Department of Health (www.healthywa.wa.gov.au). The estimated time to read the educational material is 10 minutes, and use of the link is tracked via the Smart phone application. The subjects can enter the data at any location and adherence is tracked through the smart phone application.