Personalized Medicine: Home Monitoring as a Tool to Patient Empowerment. Rate Control Self-adjustment in Patients With Permanent or Persistent Atrial Fibrillation Using Cardiovascular Implantable Electronic Device (CIED) Information

Patients with permanent or persistent atrial fibrillation require rate control medication to prevent heart rate (HR) speed up. Beta-blockers or calcium channel blockers are used to achieve a reasonable HR; symptoms, EKG and Holter recordings guide clinicians to rate control targets at clinical encounters (at our pacemaker clinic at 6 to 12 months intervals). Once a target HR is achieved, unless new symptoms arise, medication is seldom modified. Rate control medications need to be well adjusted: if not enough dose administered, HR will increase, leading to palpitations, shortness of breath and eventually heart failure; if too much medication is given, patients would experience low cardiac output symptoms (fatigue, tiredness, shortness of breath, low blood pressure, and eventually syncope). Clinicians tend to over control heart rates with no added benefits.

Most of patients with a pacemaker or defibrillator at our center are offered a remote monitoring system as part of a regular follow up schema at our pacemaker clinic; usually to reduce in face encounters, and to be alerted if a problem arises with the pacemaker or defibrillator. There are many remote monitoring systems (five, one for each vendor implanted at our center), and the Home Monitoring® (HM) from Biotronik is specially friendly as all information from the device (pacemaker or defibrillator) is transmitted every day to our clinic with no interaction from the patient side. Beside device status itself (remaining battery, system integrity) daily mean heart rates (measured in beats per minute: bpm) and patient activity (measured as hours per day in activity, as detected by the movement or activity sensor implanted in the device) are also transmitted, but if HR are between safety boundaries (programmed for each patient after implant), all information is rarely used for any other purpose.

If patients with permanent or persistent atrial fibrillation, rate control stable medication, and a HM pacemaker, are followed closely (every week) to adjust the medication (every week if needed, by the research team at the beginning) based on mean heart rates and daily activities already received, we hypothesize that patients will achieve not only better rate control targets, but they will increase their hours of activity per day. Eventually once the patient has understood the principle, medication adjustment would be done by the patient itself based on the same simple information redirected to him or her.