Assessing the feasibility of using smartphone data to identify risk of idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension

Abstract

Idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH) is a progressive, life-limiting condition often diagnosed late due to non-specific symptoms and requirement of invasive right heart catheterisation. This pilot study explores the feasibility of using real-world physical activity data from wearable devices and a smartphone app (My Heart Counts) to aid earlier detection. We analysed up to eight years of retrospective data from 109 UK participants, including patients with IPAH, disease controls, and healthy individuals. A classifier trained on pre-diagnostic activity and heart rate, distinguished individuals with IPAH from healthy and disease controls with an ROC AUC of 0.87, improving to 0.94 with in-app questionnaire input. Validation in a matched US cohort yielded an ROC AUC of 0.74. Wearable-derived metrics correlated with clinical 6MWD supporting their potential to complement traditional risk assessment. These pilot findings suggest that digital health tools may support earlier detection and remote monitoring of IPAH warranting larger scale studies.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Delgado-SanMartin, J.A. Keles, M. Errington, N. Schuetz, N. Johnson, A. Gupta, V. Hershman, S. Toshner, M. Wilkins, M.R. Kiely, D.G. Thompson, R. Ashley, E. Wang, D. Lawrie, A.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2026. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	Biomarkers; Cardiology; Diseases; Health care; Medical research
Dates:	Accepted: 7 March 2026 Published (online): 25 March 2026 Published: 25 March 2026
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health (Sheffield) > School of Medicine and Population Health
Date Deposited:	08 Apr 2026 10:36
Last Modified:	08 Apr 2026 10:36
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s44325-026-00114-9
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:239773

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Assessing the feasibility of using smartphone data to identify risk of idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension

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