Um estudo sobre aplicações destinadas ao auxílio de portadores de asma no acompanhamento médico remoto

Abstract

People with Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), including asthma, require continuous care to keep their symptoms and quality of life under control. With the pandemic of COVID-19, several routine medical consultations stopped being performed for a long period, which can bring some harm to this public. The use of digital technologies can come in as a tool to help maintain medical monitoring remotely. To this end, some Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) were used in the first months of the pandemic as emergency measures, which also opened space for discussions and proposals for developing tools that have people with NCDs at the center of the design process, thus meeting the needs of this public more assertively and satisfactorily. Therefore, this work intends to investigate the use of digital technologies in the medical follow-up of patients with NCDs, Chronic Respiratory Diseases (CRD), and Asthma, having as context the health services in Brazil, to understand how these tools were used and what is the perception of health professionals and patients in the use of them as a means of enabling continuous medical care, and thus enable the development of an application proposal to support the remote care of these people. The present work was structured following Jesse James Garrett’s framework, used for the development of digital products, and divided into five plans - strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface. It’s important to highlight that only the first plan of the methodology was done in the present work. In the strategy plan, a literature review of several works in the health area was performed, as the creation of possible personas for a possible application, and a benchmarking of digital tools to support asthma sufferers. Thus, data were collected to validate the development of a proposal, which can be done following the planning of the steps of Garrett’s framework that could not be executed in this cycle, thus having as a final product an application prototype that helps asthma carriers to control the symptoms of the disease remotely.