**Author details**

Annalisa Fogazzi, Fabianna Timelli, Annalisa Vezzoli, Valentina Tradati and Rita Padoan\* Regional Support Cystic Fibrosis Centre, University of Brescia—Children's Hospital, Brescia, Italy

\*Address all correspondence to: ritaf54@gmail.com

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Chapter 7**

**Abstract**

self-management

**1. Introduction**

diet, and exercise.

**105**

Designing Heterogeneous-mHealth

In this chapter, we will discuss the design and development of a patient passport mHealth application for Cystic Fibrosis adults from ideation to app-store release. By allowing the patients access to their own unique data, it is anticipated that it will be of benefit when travelling abroad and between CF centres. The design process followed a pipeline we developed that is informed by patient and healthcare professional input. The app structure resembles an Irish patient file and is divided into three categories: "My CF Info", "My Medical History", and "My Clinical Appointments". My CF Info allows the patient to store personal information such genotype, medical team contact information, physiotherapy, allergies, and medications. My Medical History allows the user to record information such as CF renal disease, CF diabetes, and the insertion/removal of a portacath/gastrostomy tube. My Clinical Appointments allows the user to record the type of appointment (annual assessment, clinic, other) and all information that would ordinarily be inserted into a patient file such as weight, height, spirometry and other comments. Weight and lung function are also displayed in a plot graph. The app has undergone pilot testing

Apps for Cystic Fibrosis Adults

*Mairead McCarthy, Sabin Tabirca and Barry J. Plant*

with five CF adults before being rolled out onto the Google Play Store.

Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is the most common life limiting genetic disease affecting Caucasians. Patients must adhere to rigorous therapies in order to manage their condition. Such therapies include airway clearance physiotherapy, medications,

Ireland has the highest prevalence of CF worldwide, with 1 in 19 people being carriers for the CF gene [1]. Despite this, the life expectancy of patients with CF is rising. A child born with CF in 2009 is now predicted to live into their 50s [2, 3], compared to children born in 1950, of which half would live to the age of 16 and only 3% to 25 years old [4, 5]. However, this increase in life expectancy comes with an increase in patient population. There are now more adult CF patients than pediatric patients in Ireland [6]. It is projected that the pediatric service will need to

grow by 25% and the adult service by 75% by 2025 [7]. This growth in adult population and the advent of ICT technologies in the medical space has led to mobile health applications (mHealth apps) being identified as potential powerful

**Keywords:** cystic fibrosis, patient passport, mHealth, digital health,

*Tamara Vagg, Cathy Shortt, Claire Fleming,*
