Wearable Biosensors in Congenital Heart Disease

Figures

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  FIGURE 1. Potential Uses for Wearable Biosensors in Interstage Home Monitoring For patients with single ventricle heart disease who are in the interstage period, one potential use case for wearable biosensors is to use the continuous physiologic data from the wearables to detect pattern changes in vital signs as precursors to adverse clinical events. Given that oxygen saturation and heart rate are salient vitals in this population, analyzing those data may be a good starting point, but novel metrics may be useful in the future as well. Shown here are data from a hypothetical interstage patient using a wearable continuous pulse oximeter.

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  FIGURE 2. Potential Uses for Wearable Biosensors Before and After Major Interventions In some congenital heart disease populations, timing of major interventions, such as pulmonary valve replacement in repaired tetralogy of Fallot, remains unclear. Wearable biosensors may provide a method of assessing physiologic response to pulmonary valve replacement, by comparing to current standard metrics like CMR, or by development of novel digital biomarkers. CMR = cardiovascular magnetic resonance; PVR = pulmonary valve replacement.

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  FIGURE 3. Potential Uses for Wearable Biosensors in the Slowly Deteriorating Patient A fundamental challenge in using wearable biosensors to track patients with slow declines, like those with a Fontan circulation, is identifying the best time to use wearables to generate continuous physiologic data. Is it better to try to catch early, subtle declines, or capture continuous physiologic data closer to clinical adverse events, where the outcome is clearer, but interventions may be too late?

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  CENTRAL ILLUSTRATION. Current and Future Use Cases for Wearable Biosensors in Congenital Heart Disease This figure outlines different form factors of wearable biosensors that are being or may be used for patients with congenital heart disease across the age spectrum and the physiologic data that are currently collected by wearable biosensors. Given the broad anthropometric, developmental, and physiologic changes that patients with congenital heart disease undergo throughout their lives, different form factors are needed to collect applicable physiologic data.