An autonomous mobile system for the management of COPD

Introduction: Managing chronic disease through automated systems has the potential to both benefit the patient and reduce health-care costs. We have developed and evaluated a disease management system for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Its aim is to predict and detect exacerbations and, through this, help patients self-manage their disease to prevent hospitalisation. Materials: The carefully crafted intelligent system consists of a mobile device that is able to collect case-specific, subjective and objective, physiological data, and to alert the patient by a patient-specific interpretation of the data by means of probabilistic reasoning. Collected data are also sent to a central server for inspection by health-care professionals. Methods: We evaluated the probabilistic model using cross-validation and ROC analyses on data from an earlier study and by an independent data set. Furthermore a pilot with actual COPD patients has been conducted to test technical feasibility and to obtain user feedback. Results: Model evaluation results show that we can reliably detect exacerbations. Pilot study results suggest that an intervention based on this system could be successful.