Consumer-facing and professional medical devices in cardiology: monitoring and evaluation of big data and the implications for the practice of cardiology.

Abstract

Introduction: With the ever-expanding increase in the availability of electronic devices that can monitor everything from a patient's daily step count to more detailed devices that can measure or estimate pulmonary artery pressures in patients with heart failure, the amount of data measured by these devices produces mountains of information.

Areas covered: Our review will examine the various options and developments of both consumer-facing and professional medical devices. We discuss provider-facing cardiac devices including pacemakers, implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, Holter monitors, implantable loop recorders, left ventricular assist devices, patch monitors, and pulmonary artery pressure sensors, as well as consumer-facing cardiac medical devices including the Apple Watch and the Fitbit wearable device. We searched through the available studies on the PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Embase databases for information on these devices. The role of artificial intelligence in the analysis and interpretation of data currently and in the future is also discussed.

Expert opinion: We expect future consumer-facing cardiac medical devices to focus on ventricular arrhythmias especially given their clinical impact. We also expect clinical data and patient-specific information to play a larger role as artificial intelligence advances, and it becomes more capable of drawing conclusions using multiple variables from a single patient.