Monitoring and Follow-up of Chronic Heart Failure: a Literature Review of eHealth Applications and Systems

In developed countries heart failure is one of the most important causes of death, followed closely by strokes and other cerebrovascular diseases. It is one of the major healthcare issues in terms of increasing number of patients, rate of hospitalizations and costs. The main aim of this paper is to present telemedicine applications for monitoring and follow-up of heart failure and to show how these systems can help reduce costs of administering heart failure. The search for e-health applications and systems in the field of telemonitoring of heart failure was pursued in IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, PubMed and Scopus systems between 2005 and the present time. This search was conducted between May and June 2015, and the articles deemed to be of most interest about treatment, prevention, self-empowerment and stabilization of patients were selected. Over 100 articles about telemonitoring of heart failure have been found in the literature reviewed since 2005, although the most interesting ones have been selected from the scientific standpoint. Many of them show that telemonitoring of patients with a high risk of heart failure is a measure that might help to reduce the risk of suffering from the disease. Following the review conducted, in can be stated that via the research articles analysed that telemonitoring systems can help to reduce the costs of administering heart failure and result in less re-hospitalization of patients.