Mobile health (mHealth) is an increasingly important area of biomedical informatics that is focused on the use of wearable sensors, such as those found in smartphones, to monitor health. This is an exciting area because of the widespread availability and use of such devices by the public. Albaghli and Anderson provide a clear review of the potential for this technology to improve healthcare, as well as some of the technological and informatics challenges. They use heart rate monitoring as the motivating example.

An important focus of the paper is the gathering of information about the role of heart rate in health through multiple interviews with physicians. The goal is to use this information to better inform the development of wearable technology for gathering and reporting essential data. The authors interviewed five physicians and were able to identify four different scenarios by which wearable devices could improve the use of heart rate monitoring. First, they stress the importance of allowing subjects to indicate through the device when they might be having a worrisome event. Second, they highlight the importance of detecting heart rate anomalies such as arrhythmia in the data. Then, they point out the benefits of users being able to monitor their own heart rate. Finally, they mention the value of the data for reducing false positives that might occur in the doctor’s office. With these four scenarios in mind, the authors suggest a prototype visual interface to help summarize the data collected.

There is much work to do in this area to develop and fully evaluate optimal strategies for improving health using wearable technology. In addition to making sure the right data is getting to users and their physicians, there are numerous informatics challenges that must be addressed. For example, these devices generate a lot of data that must be transmitted back to a clinical database or the patient’s electronic health record (EHR) for evaluation. How much of this data should be stored? How will it be integrated with other data in the EHR? How will it be summarized for easy interpretation by the physician? How will the physician know if the data came from the patient or from another person using the device? What are the security and privacy issues? How will clinical trials be designed to fully evaluate their clinical utility? This is an exciting and potentially useful technology that is ripe for biomedical and clinical research studies. This study provides a starting point.