| dc.description.abstract | Adhering to medical therapy is a significant ongoing issue within the health sector. For patients with heart failure, it is vital for them to take their beta-blocker medication as it significantly reduces stress on their heart by lowering their heart rate. With the technological advances in recent years and the increased number of wearable smart devices which can measure resting heart rates, this thesis aims to create an application using Apple Watch smartwatches and iPhone smartphones to monitor and warn heart failure patients if they have forgotten to take their medicine. In order to develop the application, we identified three functional requirements which the application would be dependent on: (i) fetching heart rate, (ii) dispatching notifications and (iii) running in the background. The requirements were researched with regards to their respective frameworks and limitations and then used during development to find an approach that would work for the application. The functionality was then combined to create a complete application, which was further configured and tuned for user-testing. To verify if the application developed was working as intended, including if it had any potential for a real scenario, four participants tested the application for a duration between two and ten weeks. The participants participated in semi-formal interviews where they were asked questions about their experiences with the application and if the application fulfilled its purpose. The interviews indicated that the application worked as a minimum viable product by achieving the intended functionality and showed great promise for actual patients. The results indicate that it is possible to develop mHealth applications for smartphones and smartwatches, which uses real-life, real-time resting heart rate data to increase patient adherence to medical therapy. Despite the application developed only was tested on healthy participants, the thesis lays the foundation for further development and research to tailor the app for actual patients. | eng |