Incorporating remote patient monitoring in virtual pulmonary rehabilitation programs

Most pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) programs have had to adapt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions. Current alternative home-based programs have limitations and require modification. In this paper, we outline a novel method to monitor home-based PR programs, which has the potential to improve PR safety and efficacy. This new method is based on a remote patient monitoring (RPM) system with connected smart devices that enables the Respiratory Therapist (RT) to have real-time access to patient data including heart rate and peripheral oxygen saturation during exercise. The RPM system also monitors daily physical activity, sedentary time, sleep quality, rescue inhaler use, and maintenance inhaler adherence, among other variables, which has the added advantage of predicting patterns consistent with symptoms that may require medical intervention. To increase privacy, data are anonymized at all levels and only the RT has access to patient information. RPM systems have the potential to give practitioners a holistic view of the participants’ health status to better evaluate them during the entire PR program and to improve self-management. As this is not a formal research study, we cannot make definitive conclusions about the efficacy of the system, and further research is needed to examine safety and to compare our approach to other ways of conducting PR.