System Dynamics Modeling for Smartphone-Based Healthcare Tools: Case Study on ECG Monitoring

With the rapid growth of technology and the advances in smart healthcare, patients nowadays struggle with finding suitable smart healthcare interfaces that offer the most effective and manageable personalized care. System dynamics (SD) investigates the behavior of various factors of a system and thus, can offer plausible solutions in this regard. This article presents the research ideas and conceptualization of a framework to determine the factors that influence the effectiveness of a personal healthcare response monitoring system from a systems engineering perspective. A SD model for smartphone-based healthcare monitoring is introduced. Specifically, smartphone-based heart monitoring using electrocardiogram (ECG) is studied in this article from a SD point of view. The model includes factors such as patient wellbeing and care, cost, convenience, user friendliness, in addition to other embedded ECG system design and performance metrics (e.g., accuracy, real-time response, etc.). The model has been rigorously tested and the simulation results reflect the dynamics of the model and the effectiveness of smartphone-based ECG monitoring in various scenarios. The proposed framework has the potential to facilitate visualizing the effectiveness of smartphone-based healthcare monitoring systems for users.