Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Randomized Controlled Trial
. 2021 Mar 15;45(4):54.
doi: 10.1007/s10916-021-01730-x.

TensioBot: a Chatbot Assistant for Self-Managed in-House Blood Pressure Checking

Leyre Echeazarra #  1   2 , Juanan Pereira #  3 , Ramón Saracho  4   5
Affiliations
Randomized Controlled Trial

TensioBot: a Chatbot Assistant for Self-Managed in-House Blood Pressure Checking

Leyre Echeazarra et al. J Med Syst. .

Abstract

Hypertension is a chronic condition that can lead to serious health problems. Patients with High Blood Pressure (HBP) are often asked to have their BP checked at home. The traditional at-home procedure has some drawbacks, such as forgetting to check or write down the values, errors in transcribing the numbers, or the impossibility of immediately notifying medical staff of out-of-range BP values. To facilitate self-measurements by patients at home we devised TensioBot, a Telegram based chatbot. The bot sends patients reminders to check their BP, advice on good monitoring practices, measurement tracking, medical alerts and allows healthcare professionals to access up-to-date measurement information. TensioBot has been tested for two years in a randomized controlled trial with 112 patients (55 using the bot and 57 in the control group). We found that, although the bot group showed similar results in terms of adherence to the BP checking schedule, bot users scored better in terms of knowledge and skills on BP checking best practices. Participants rated the bot very positively, perceived it as useful and easy to use, and continued to use it after the intervention. Moreover, all data being equal, we describe some other benefits of using a chatbot for self-managed in-house BP control, both for patients and healthcare professionals and systems.

Keywords: Blood pressure; Chatbots; Hypertension; mHealth.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Alessa, T., Hawley, M. S., Hock, E. S., & Witte, L. de. (2019). Smartphone Apps to support self-management of hypertension: Review and content analysis JMIR MHealth and UHealth, 7(5), e13645. 10/ghvf7h. - DOI
    1. Calvaresi, D., Calbimonte, J., Dubosson, F., Najjar, A., & Schumacher, M. (2019). Social Network Chatbots for Smoking Cessation: Agent and Multi-Agent Frameworks. 2019 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI), 286-292.
    1. Chaix, B., Guillemassé, A., Nectoux, P., Delamon, G., & Brouard, B. (2020). Vik: A Chatbot to Support Patients with Chronic Diseases. Health, 12, 804-810. https://doi.org/10.4236/health.2020.127058 - DOI
    1. Cheng, A., Raghavaraju, V., Kanugo, J., Handrianto, Y. P., & Shang, Y. (2018). Development and evaluation of a healthy coping voice interface application using the Google home for elderly patients with type 2 diabetes. 2018 15th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications Networking Conference (CCNC), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC.2018.8319283 .
    1. Cruz-Sandoval, D., & Favela, J. (2017). Semi-autonomous Conversational Robot to Deal with Problematic Behaviors from People with Dementia. En S. F. Ochoa, P. Singh, & J. Bravo (Eds.), Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (pp. 677-688). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67585-5_66 .

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources