Monitoring sarcopenia with wearable devices: a systematic review protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Sarcopenia is a highly prevalent muscle dysfunction among older adults and is associated with adverse events. The periodic monitoring enables an early screening of patients at risk and control of the progression of muscle impairment. Wearable devices have been used as clinical support for sarcopenia detection. Therefore, this review aims to identify how wearable devices have been used to screen sarcopenia. METHODS AND ANALYSES: Searches will be conducted from August 2023 on PubMed, CINHAL, Embase, Web of Science and SciELO databases. We will include cross-sectional and/or baseline data from prospective studies reporting the use of wearable devices to investigate sarcopenia. Studies that discuss only the development of algorithms or applications for the assessment of sarcopenia or unavailable full texts will be excluded. The main reviewer will conduct the initial search and exclusion of duplicates, while two independent reviewers will select studies, extract data and assess the methodological quality using the Appraisal tool for Cross-sectional Studies. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: No previous ethical approval is required for this review. The findings of this review will be submitted to a scientific journal and disclosed at international scientific conferences. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER: CRD42022356040.

Promoting Obesity Prevention and Healthy Habits in Childhood: The OCARIoT Experience.

OBJECTIVE: Long term behavioural disturbances and interventions in healthy habits (mainly eating and physical activity) are the primary cause of childhood obesity. Current approaches for obesity prevention based on health information extraction lack the integration of multi-modal datasets and the provision of a dedicated Decision Support System (DSS) for health behaviour assessment and coaching of children. METHODS: Continuous co-creation process has been applied in the frame of the Design Thinking Methodology, involving children, educators and healthcare professional in the whole process. Such considerations were used to derive the user needs and the technical requirements needed for the conception of the Internet of Things (IoT) platform based on microservices. RESULTS: To promote the adoption of healthy habits and the prevention of the obesity onset for children (9-12 years old), the proposed solution empowers children -including families and educators- in taking control of their health by collecting and following-up real-time information about nutrition, physical activity data coming from IoT devices, and interconnecting healthcare professionals to provide a personalised coaching solution. The validation has two phases involving +400 children (control/intervention group), on four schools in three countries: Spain, Greece and Brazil. The prevalence of obesity decreased in 75.5% from baseline levels in the intervention group. The proposed solution created a positive impression and satisfaction from the technology acceptance perspective. CONCLUSIONS: Main findings confirm that this ecosystem can assess behaviours of children, motivating and guiding them towards achieving personal goals. Clinical and Translational Impact Statement-This study presents Early Research on the adoption of a smart childhood obesity caring solution adopting a multidisciplinary approach; it involves researchers from biomedical engineering, medicine, computer science, ethics and education. The solution has the potential to decrease the obesity rates in children aiming to impact to get a better global health.

Risk factors and survival in patients with COVID-19 in northeastern Brazil.

BACKGROUND: Knowledge about the epidemiology and risk factors surrounding COVID-19 contributes to developing better health strategies to combat the disease. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to establish a survival analysis and identify the risk factors for patients with COVID-19 in an upper middle-income city in Brazil. METHODS: A retrospective cohort study was conducted with 280 hospitalized patients with COVID-19. The eCOVID platform provided data to monitor COVID-19 cases and help the communication between professionals. RESULTS: Age ≥ 65 years was associated with decreased survival (54.8%), and females had a lower survival rate than males (p = 0.01). Regarding risk factors, urea concentration (p<0.001), hospital length of stay (p = 0.002), oxygen concentration (p = 0.005), and age (p = 0.02) were associated with death. CONCLUSION: Age, hospital length of stay, high blood urea concentration, and low oxygen concentration were associated with death by COVID-19 in the studied population. These findings corroborate with studies conducted in research centers worldwide.

HRV Monitoring Using Commercial Wearable Devices as a Health Indicator for Older Persons during the Pandemic.

Remote monitoring platforms based on advanced health sensors have the potential to become important tools during the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting the reduction in risks for affected populations such as the elderly. Current commercially available wearable devices still have limitations to deal with heart rate variability (HRV), an important health indicator of human aging. This study analyzes the role of a remote monitoring system designed to support health services to older people during the complete course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, since its beginning in Brazil in March 2020 until November 2021, based on HRV. Using different levels of analysis and data, we validated HRV parameters by comparing them with reference sensors and tools in HRV measurements. We compared the results obtained for the cardiac modulation data in time domain using samples of 10 elderly people's HRV data from Fitbit Inspire HR with the results provided by Kubios for the same population using a cardiac belt, with the data divided into train and test, where 75% of the data were used for training the models, with the remaining 25% as a test set for evaluating the final performance of the models. The results show that there is very little difference between the results obtained by the remote monitoring system compared with Kubios, indicating that the data obtained from these devices might provide accurate results in evaluating HRV in comparison with gold standard devices. We conclude that the application of the methods and techniques used and reported in this study are useful for the creation and validation of HRV indicators in time series obtained by means of wearable devices based on photoplethysmography sensors; therefore, they can be incorporated into remote monitoring processes as seen during the pandemic.