Summary
Background Hypertension or high blood pressure is on the rise. Not only does it affect the elderly
but is also increasingly spreading to younger sectors of the population. Treating
this condition involves exhaustive monitoring of patients. The current mobile health
services can be improved to perform this task more effectively.
Objective To develop a useful, user-friendly, robust and efficient app, to monitor hypertensive
patients and adapted to the particular requirements of hypertension.
Methods This work presents BPcontrol, an Android and iOS app that allows hypertensive patients
to communicate with their health-care centers, thus facilitating monitoring and diagnosis.
Usability, robustness and efficiency factors for BPcontrol were evaluated for different
devices and operating systems (Android, iOS and system-aware). Furthermore, its features
were compared with other similar apps in the literature.
Results BPcontrol is robust and user-friendly. The respective start-up efficiency of the
Android and iOS versions of BPcontrol were 2.4 and 8.8 times faster than a system-aware
app. Similar values were obtained for the communication efficiency (7.25 and 11.75
times faster for the Android and iOS respectively). When comparing plotting performance,
BPcontrol was on average 2.25 times faster in the Android case. Most of the apps in
the literature have no communication with a server, thus making it impossible to compare
their performance with BPcontrol.
Conclusions
Its optimal design and the good behavior of its facilities make BPcontrol a very promising
mobile app for monitoring hypertensive patients.
Citation: Carrera A, Pifarré M, Vilaplana J, Cuadrado J, Solsona S, Mateo J, Solsona F. BPcontrol:
a mobile app to monitor hypertensive patients
Keywords
Hypertension - telemedicine and telehealth - remote monitoring
