WANDA: an end-to-end remote health monitoring and analytics system for heart failure patients

Abstract

Recent advances in wireless sensors, mobile technologies, and cloud computing have made continuous remote monitoring of patients possible. In this paper, we introduce the design and implementation of WANDA, an end-to-end remote health monitoring and analytics system designed for heart failure patients. The system consists of a smartphone-based data collection gateway, an Internet-scale data storage and search system, and a backend analytics engine for diagnostic and prognostic purposes. The system supports the collection of data from a wide range of sensory devices that measure patients' vital signs as well as self-reported questionnaires. The main objective of the analytics engine is to predict future events by examining physiological readings of the patients. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed analytics engine using the data gathered from a pilot study of 18 heart failure patients. In particular, our results show that the advanced analytic algorithms used in our system are capable of predicting the worsening of patients' heart failure symptoms with up to 74% accuracy while improving the sensitivity performance by more than 45% compared to the commonly used thresholding algorithm based on daily weight change. Moreover, the accuracy attained by our system is only 9% lower than the theoretical upper bound. The proposed framework is currently deployed in a large ongoing heart failure study that targets 1500 congestive heart failure patients.