Continuous home oxygen therapy (CHOT) is the continuous, general and/or undefined administration of oxygen in the home of patients with chronic hypoxemia. This therapy is aimed at increasing hypoxemic patients’ life expectancy, raising their tolerance to physical activity and decreasing clinical impairment because of reduced blood oxygen levels [
1,
2]. In 2001, an increase in the prevalence of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) was observed in Colombia, along with an increase of home oxygen prescriptions for the first stages of therapy, resulting in 3,176 patients enrolled in a home healthcare program. However, no information about their sociodemographic and epidemiologic characteristics is available, which can be explained by the scarce number of epidemiological studies about this therapy. However, González et al. highlight that current prescriptions should be reviewed, and research should be performed to establish guidelines for recommending home oxygen therapy in patients with COPD [
3,
4]. In Colombia, the largest COPD registry was created as a result of the Prepocol study (Prevalence of COPD in 5 Colombian Cities Situated at Low, Medium and High Altitude, published in 2008) [
5], in which a prevalence of spirometrically defined COPD of 8.9% was estimated. However, no recent data have been collected in new epidemiological studies. It is worth mentioning that the World Health Organization (WHO) described COPD as the third cause of death [
6] worldwide, representing a public health concern and one of the primary morbidity and mortality causes. Regarding the costs of hospitalization and COPD exacerbations in Colombia, each exacerbation costs an average of $98, and this value can reach up to almost $700 during hospitalization [
7]. Oxygen therapy is essential for COPD management because it can control symptoms, reduce hospital stays and increase survival [
8]. However, adherence to this therapy should be consistently monitored. A study performed by Barruecos et al. [
9,
10] reported a high rate of noncompliance of patients on home oxygen therapy. Consequently, Mesquita et al. [
11] revealed that the quality of life of COPD patients who fail to adhere to oxygen therapy is lower in the long term than that of patients adhering to such therapy. Exacerbations may be observed in patients with COPD, characterized by dyspnea, increased coughing and discharge changes. Moreover, two or more exacerbations per year are considered as acute exacerbations of the disease and have a negative impact on patients’ health. A significant percentage of COPD patients discharged from hospital after an acute exacerbation are readmitted within the next three months, increasing the emergency services attendance rate. Certain factors associated with readmission include poor in-home care, non-adherence to treatment, and limited information about their condition [
8,
11]
. Therefore, it is essential to develop in-home follow-up and monitoring strategies because home visits allow for a real-time patient examination in the place where therapy usually takes place and are well-accepted by patients [
12,
13]. Although the benefits and the clinical and gasometrical criteria for the use of oxygen supplies are well described in literature, the availability of protocols and registry and follow-up instruments for patients hospitalized at home is significantly lesser [
1,
3]. Therefore, new healthcare technologies should be used to monitor these patients at home. E-health incorporates information and communication technologies (ICTs) to healthcare products, services, and processes. In this sense, it is defined as the set of ICTs tools that are used in a healthcare environment for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up activities, as well as for health management, improving the efficacy of the latter [
4]. This term encompasses different healthcare products and services, such as mobile applications (apps) and telemedicine, which includes diagnosis, treatment, and health education. With this technological resource, it is possible to improve healthcare services, save time and money and simplify access of health professionals to remote areas. Moreover, the term “mHealth” should be mentioned as a part of eHealth. Although no standardized definition has been made for this term, the Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe) defined it as a public health medical practice compatible with mobile and wireless devices, such as smartphones, for monitoring patients and the use of virtual assistants [
14]. Because mobile health (mHealth) uses smartphones as a complement to medical healthcare, some of its benefits are the possibility of overcoming certain barriers associated with clinical healthcare and adopting technological and innovative interventions to achieve safer clinical practices through resource optimization and patient and/or caregivers’ active participation [
15,
16]. These eHealth platforms are an opportunity to develop research, thus providing additional methods to collect, process and analyze health data. Moreover, certain authors focus on the development of new approaches of citizen participation in science [
3,
5]. To summarize, it is remarkable that a health professional, patient and/or caregiver use a smartphone and a specific app to access a data source that can be used by the scientific community for their research, thus improving healthcare processes [
17]. For the abovementioned reasons, the use of mobile technologies in healthcare is becoming a reality capable of changing the current healthcare paradigm. App functions include data collection, epidemiologic surveillance, patient follow-up, health promotion, disease prevention, access to health data and emergency management [
17]. In any case, it seems evident that technologies can address the necessity of achieving a continuous connection in the control of health-disease processes through ICTs [
16]. The most innovative aspects of these technologies include real-time information transmission, the possibility to access management guidelines for clinical decision making, and content customization [
6]. In a study conducted by Mirkovic et al. [
18], aaimed at assessing the usability of Connect Mobile — an app that granted access to an online system providing support to cancer patients in the management of health problems and involved final users in the application design — highlighted the importance, the requirement, and the potential of integrating mobile phones and tablets into patient healthcare systems, as well as of respecting and considering the design suggestions made by users [
18]. In this sense, it would be interesting to approach the clinical monitoring of patients on home oxygen therapy through a mobile app aimed at achieving improvements in the treatment, prescription, information, and safety of patients during in-home healthcare processes. Pereira et al. [
19], in collaboration with the School of Health Sciences of Universidad de Averio, Portugal, developed Exercit@rt, an app capable of monitoring COPD patients’ real-time heart rate and oxygen saturation levels through a Bluetooth oximeter. Based on this technology, patients can perform, control, geolocalize and assess different respiratory exercises, as well as common daily physical activities. Moreover, this research project incorporated a validation stage involving ten patients with respiratory disorders: five smartphone’s frequent users (SFU) and five smartphone’s non-frequent users (SNFU). The main results revealed that all participants recognized the usefulness of monitoring their disease using the Exercit@rt mobile app [
19]. In a literature review about the effectiveness of eHealth interventions in COPD cases, Hallensleben et al. reported a meta-analysis of 10 studies about the teleassistance of this condition, in which a decrease in the number of visits to the emergency and hospitalization rooms was observed as opposed to the control groups receiving regular care [
20,
21]. Rassouli et al. [
22] digitalized information about patients attending a pulmonary rehabilitation program through a mobile app, which evidenced changes in patients’ quality of life over a of 20-day exercise period. Moreover, Velardo et al. [
23] designed an eHealth platform for COPD patients, which also included a mobile app, such that they could manage and control their condition. Patients used the app to complete a symptoms diary, and their oxygen saturation was measured with a wireless pulse oximeter. The clinical trial evidenced a high compliance of self-control during a prolonged period (12 months). Marscha et al. [
24] conducted a controlled, randomized trial with an intervention group and a control group of patients with cardiovascular diseases. They designed the Vascular View software to increase self-management behavior of patients with cardiovascular conditions. The intervention group was granted 12-month access to an online self-management software (Vascular View). Assessments took place at baseline and after 6 and 12 months. The results confirmed positive and significant changes over the 12-month period in the intervention group. Arostegui et al. [
25] developed an app (PrEveCOPD) to predict adverse events and complications in the short-term progression of patients with COPD. This app is interesting because it shows how clinical prediction measures can be summarized into simple and user-friendly tools, which can be used to estimate the short-term risk of mortality and admission to ICUs. To summarize, it seems evident that health mobile technologies are providing different strategies for the long-term management of chronic diseases, in addition to being convenient, cheap and interactive [
26]. Moreover, Bitsaki et al. suggest that technological health tools aimed at chronic patients are a new, sustainable, and innovative business model resulting in significant cost reductions for the health system [
27]. Furthermore, the advantages of using technological tools, such as health mobile apps, are that they increase connectivity, reduce the amount of time spent in decision-making, and optimize the use of resources aimed at home healthcare [
28,
29]. However, despite the aforementioned positive experiences in the use of mobile apps for different groups of chronic patients, the number of Latin American and Colombian apps is lesser, and this issue should be addressed since most home oxygen supplies are usually underused by patients, which results in an increase of Health System costs and a decrease in coverage based on the requirement for oxygen cylinders. This could be avoided if technological tools with adequate monitoring were incorporated. Thus, we propose this protocol whose purpose is to assess the efficacy of a mobile app in the monitoring of patients under home oxygen therapy through an intervention aimed at decreasing acute exacerbations and increasing self-management of oxygen supplies at patients’ home.