Performance Evaluation of the Commonly-Used Portable Cholesterol Sensors for Telehealth Services in the Unreached Communities.

Abstract

Portable medical sensors play an important role in healthcare services, especially in rural communities. Many telehealth systems use these devices for providing patients' vital information from a distance to remote doctors. Erroneous data will not only mislead the remote doctor for correct diagnosis but it will cause health threats to these unreached community people. Therefore, it is very important to identify good sensors with an acceptable level of accuracy but within the affordable price of the available sensors in the market. This study aims to identify quality portable cholesterol sensors with high accuracy with the reference of the Japanese clinical pathology laboratory as a gold standard. We have considered cholesterol sensors that measure total cholesterol for this study that are commonly used in the developing countries of Asia. We found that out of four, three of them were very much erroneous and cannot be recommended even for primary healthcare.