Influence of Connected Health Interventions for Adherence to Cardiovascular Disease Prevention: A Scoping Review

Recent health care developments include connected health interventions to improve chronic disease management and/or promote actions reducing aggravating risk factors for conditions such as cardiovascular diseases. Adherence is one of the main challenges for ensuring the correct use of connected health interventions over time.

This scoping review deals with the connected health interventions used in interventional studies, describing the ways in which these interventions and their functions effectively help patients to deal with cardiovascular risk factors over time, in their own environments. The objective is to acquire knowledge and highlight current trends in this field, which is currently both productive and immature.

A structured literature review was constructed from Medline-indexed journals in PubMed. We established inclusion criteria relating to three dimensions (cardiovascular risk factors, connected health interventions, and level of adherence). Our initial search yielded 98 articles; 78 were retained after screening on the basis of title and abstract, 49 articles underwent full-text screening, and 24 were finally retained for the analysis, according to preestablished inclusion criteria. We excluded studies of invasive interventions and studies not dealing with digital health. We extracted a description of the connected health interventions from data for the population or end users.

We performed a synthetic analysis of outcomes, based on the distribution of bibliometrics, and identified several connected health interventions and main characteristics affecting adherence. Our analysis focused on three types of user action: to read, to do, and to connect. Finally, we extracted current trends in characteristics: connect, adherence, and influence.

Connected health interventions for prevention are unlikely to affect outcomes significantly unless other characteristics and user preferences are considered. Future studies should aim to determine which connected health design combinations are the most effective for supporting long-term changes in behavior and for preventing cardiovascular disease risks.