Home-based Remote Monitoring

Acute myocardial infarction (MI) is a disease of high morbidity and mortality. It is usually caused by atherothrombosis of major epicardial coronary arteries which result in myocardial necrosis. Due to improvement in care systems, availability of revascularizations and better medical treatment, the mortality of MI has generally declined in the past 20 years. Nevertheless, patients survived MI are still at heightened risk of further cardiovascular events and death. Therefore, guideline directed secondary preventive measures are of paramount importance to improve long term outcome. These include adherence to medications and dose titration, risk factor modification, detection of arrhythmia and use of implantable cardio-defibrillator (ICD) as appropriate. In reality, guideline adherence is unsatisfactory and may lead to worse clinical outcomes. The underlying reasons are multi-factorial, including lack of patient education, recognition, motivation or physician inertia. Therefore, newer initiatives are required to reinforce secondary preventive measures. In current era of health information technology, remote monitoring and telecommunication emerge to be practice-changing in various aspects of healthcare provision. Particularly for post MI survivors, the early post discharge period is vulnerable and a significant number of patients are readmitted 30 days after leaving hospital. This is not surprising as patients are still in recovering phase on medications titration and many of them may not fully accept they are suffering from a life-threatening condition. Besides, malignant arrhythmia may develop without the protection of ICD which is usually implanted after 40 days post MI as per clinical guidelines. As such, home-based remote monitoring with handheld single-lead electrocardiogram and patch-based continuous holter monitor can potentially detect arrhythmia which prompt early clinical attention. Furthermore, daily blood pressure measurement using dedicated smartphone ap