Remote health monitoring: motivating patients

Introduction. There is currently a great number of mobile apps and devices for remote monitoring of biometric indicators used by patents and healthy people. Aim. The purpose of the paper is to review principles and methods of patient motivation for active using of mobile apps and devices for health state estimation. Matireals and methods. We conducted the analysis of 66 scientific sources for the last 5 years, 32 sources related to this theme were selected. We also used our experience of 250 000 remote consultations of urological patients. Results. Physicians should actively involve patients in care of their health – explain advantages of using mobile apps which allow to monitor health state and its changings in real time. Thus it will allow to react to emerging disfunctions, to correct them and to prevent complications or fatal outcome. In spite of evident prospectivity of remote health monitoring we can highlight several difficulties and risks, connected with it, such as low physicians’ motivation, increasing of their labor costs, safe personal and medical data storage, inaccurate and excessive data, difficulties of systematization, slow decrease of patients adherence to using mobile apps. Conclusions. The application of devices and apps for remote monitoring of health indicators is greatly promising as a source of secondary diagnostic information. Further research for clarification of remote technologies influence on clinical outcome is required. Long work for enlightenment and promoting patients’ and physicians’ interest is to be done before telemonitoring devices will occupy a niche in the healthcare system.