Sustainable Smartphone-Based Healthcare Systems: A Systems Engineering Approach to Assess the Efficacy of Respiratory Monitoring Apps

Recent technological developments along with advances in smart healthcare have been rapidly changing the healthcare industry and improving outcomes for patients. To ensure reliable smartphone-based healthcare interfaces with high levels of efficacy, a system dynamics model with sustainability indicators is proposed. The focus of this paper is smartphone-based breathing monitoring systems that could possibly use breathing sounds as the data acquisition input. This can especially be useful for the self-testing procedure of the ongoing global COVID-19 crisis in which the lungs are attacked and breathing is affected. The method of investigation is based on a systems engineering approach using system dynamics modeling. In this paper, first, a causal model for a smartphone-based respiratory function monitoring is introduced. Then, a systems thinking approach is applied to propose a system dynamics model of the smartphone-based respiratory function monitoring system. The system dynamics model investigates the level of efficacy and sustainability of the system by studying the behavior of various factors of the system including patient wellbeing and care, cost, convenience, user friendliness, in addition to other embedded software and hardware breathing monitoring system design and performance metrics (e.g., accuracy, real-time response, etc.). The sustainability level is also studied through introducing various indicators that directly relate to the three pillars of sustainability. Various scenarios have been applied and tested on the proposed model. The results depict the dynamics of the model for the efficacy and sustainability of smartphone-based breathing monitoring systems. The proposed ideas provide a clear insight to envision sustainable and effective smartphone-based healthcare monitoring systems.