Characteristics of Smart Health Ecosystems That Support Self-care Among People With Heart Failure: Scoping Review

Background: The management of heart failure is complex. Innovative solutions are required to support health care providers and people with heart failure with decision-making and self-care behaviors. In recent years, more sophisticated technologies have enabled new health care models, such as smart health ecosystems. Smart health ecosystems use data collection, intelligent data processing, and communication to support the diagnosis, management, and primary and secondary prevention of chronic conditions. Currently, there is little information on the characteristics of smart health ecosystems for people with heart failure.

Objective: We aimed to identify and describe the characteristics of smart health ecosystems that support heart failure self-care.

Methods: We conducted a scoping review using the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology. The MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library databases were searched from January 2008 to September 2021. The search strategy focused on identifying articles describing smart health ecosystems that support heart failure self-care. A total of 2 reviewers screened the articles and extracted relevant data from the included full texts.

Results: After removing duplicates, 1543 articles were screened, and 34 articles representing 13 interventions were included in this review. To support self-care, the interventions used sensors and questionnaires to collect data and used tailoring methods to provide personalized support. The interventions used a total of 34 behavior change techniques, which were facilitated by a combination of 8 features for people with heart failure: automated feedback, monitoring (integrated and manual input), presentation of data, education, reminders, communication with a health care provider, and psychological support. Furthermore, features to support health care providers included data presentation, alarms, alerts, communication tools, remote care plan modification, and health record integration.

Conclusions: This scoping review identified that there are few reports of smart health ecosystems that support heart failure self-care, and those that have been reported do not provide comprehensive support across all domains of self-care. This review describes the technical and behavioral components of the identified interventions, providing information that can be used as a starting point for designing and testing future smart health ecosystems.