IIT Roorkee develops Dhadkan Mobile App for saving lives of Heart Failure patients

NEW DELHI, MAY 1: Computational Biology group at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, led by Dr. Deepak Sharma, Assistant Professor, Department of Biotechnology, IIT Roorkee, has developed a Mobile App that can remotely monitor patients at risk of heart failure and provide them with medical assistance.

It can automatically send notification to both the doctor and the patient, in case of any drastic changes in patient's data indicating a possibility of imminent heart failure.

Named ‘Dhadkan’, this Mobile App will be of tremendous benefit to India which has about 10 million patients at risk of heart failure. The App is available for free and no charges are involved to avail the benefits of this App. About one-third of the admitted patients are likely to get re-admitted or die in the next 3-6 months. The mobile app has been designed to be ‘easy-to-use’ so that people in rural areas can also benefit.

The Dhadkan Mobile App was developed in collaboration with Prof. Sandeep Seth and Mr. Gopichandran from All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi.

Commenting on the significance of this Project, Dr. Deepak Sharma said, “This Mobile App will help in saving the precious lives of heart failure patients. Dhadkan App will be of immense help to patients who live in distant areas and cannot come at regular intervals to tertiary care hospitals.”

Explaining how the App works, he said that it collects patient's data (at any desired interval) on blood pressure, heart rate, and weight, and transmits it to the authorized caregiver (a doctor, nurse or paramedic) who is linked to the patient during the initial registration.

It also provides for two-way communication between doctors and patients. In addition, patients have the freedom to send ECG report(s) to the doctor (if needed). The App not only eliminates the need for manual monitoring of each patient by the doctor but also helps them in proactively recommending precautionary action during the treatment period.

The App will be used for conducting a randomized control trial on 100 heart failure patients at AIIMS to validate its utility and to suggest any new/useful feature(s) that can be incorporated. Mr. Somesh Chaturvedi (B.Tech Biotechnology 4th year student) and Ms. Shreya Srivastava (PhD Biotechnology 1st year student), in the Computational Biology Laboratory, have developed and designed the App in such a way that it can be easily used by rural people as well.

It will also help in the surveillance of incidence, prevalence and outcomes of heart failure in India. Dhadkan App is freely available on Google Play Store for the use of doctors and patients.