An app that tells you when to take medicine, demonstrates the effectiveness of medication management for patients with atrial fibrillation
Feb 12, 2025
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Atrial fibrillation is an arrhythmia in which irregular pulses occur in the atrium, which can cause palpitations and chest discomfort, and in severe cases, it is accompanied by dizziness and difficulty breathing. In particular, high-risk patients with a high risk of stroke due to thrombus formation should receive oral anticoagulant therapy to prevent this.
In the past, oral anticoagulants called warfarin were mainly used, but after the 2010s, vitamin K-independent oral anticoagulants have become a new treatment. This new drug is more safe than warfarin, but it has a short half-life and has the disadvantage of rapidly decreasing the effectiveness of preventing stroke even if it is missed once or twice. Recently, several domestic studies have reported that patients with atrial fibrillation have low compliance with oral anticoagulant medications, so measures to increase this are important.
Accordingly, a smartphone app developed by a research team at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital provides notifications according to the time of medication set by the patient and guides regular blood pressure and pulse measurements. In particular, it is effective in increasing patients' participation in health care and medication compliance by automatically recording measurements and checking changes in health conditions in conjunction with Bluetooth blood pressure gauges.
As a result of verifying the effectiveness of the app on 498 patients taking anticoagulants (Exaban), patients who used the app were more likely to maintain high adherence to the medication by more than 95%. 73.9% of the patient group (248) who used the app maintained high adherence to the medication for 6 months, and the proportion was only 61.0% for the control group (250) who did not use the app.
In particular, in the case of elderly patients over 65 years of age, 81.2% of the group who used the app showed high adherence to medication, while only 58.9% of the control group showed the effect. Elderly people are likely to forget to take drugs easily, but it is estimated that the app's notification function and induction of blood pressure and heart rate measurements supplemented this.
This study is significant in that it solved the problem of clinical sites where there was a limit to improving medication compliance only with outpatient treatment or telephone consultation. In particular, it is noteworthy that it has been effective as a smartphone app that can be managed by patients themselves without additional costs or facilities.
Professor Dongjoo Choi, who led the study, said "A simple smartphone app alone has significantly improved the adherence to medication and self-management of patients with atrial fibrillation."In the future, we plan to advance the app not only for atrial fibrillation but also for various heart disease patients and develop it so that it can be used in actual clinical settings."
Meanwhile, this study was conducted as a multi-center study involving nine domestic university hospitals △ Bundang Seoul National University Hospital △ Samsung Seoul Hospital △ Daeanam Hospital △ Chungbuk National University Hospital △ Gyemyeong University Dongsan Hospital △ Boramae Hospital △ Dongtan Sacred Heart Hospital △ Gangnam Sacred Heart Hospital △ Bundang Cha Hospital, and Professor Lee Seung-ryong of Kyung Hee University's Department of Computer Engineering collaborated on the app development. The results of the study were published in the latest issue of the international journal 『Journal of Medical Internet Research』 in the field of medical informatics.
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This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
