spirocall measures lung health
DESCRIPTION
SpiroCall Measures Lung Health by phone call - articleTRANSCRIPT
Sometimes you see an application of technology that’s so innovative and helpful you
can’t believe it exists in this age of narcissistic and short-sighted startups. SpiroCall, a
service that lets anyone in the world call a toll-free number and have their lung health
evaluated over the phone, seems too good to be real — but it’s real, and it’s good.
Lung disease causes hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, and chronic conditions
like asthma affect millions more — and the problem is worse in remote areas, where the
doctors and equipment needed to detect such conditions are difficult to reach, if they’re
present at all.
460 SHARES
Posted May 4, 2016 by Devin Coldewey
SpiroCall measures lung health over any phone — no appnecessary News Video Events CrunchBase
“There’s a real need to have a device that allows patients to accurately monitor their
condition at home without having to constantly visit a medical clinic, which in some
places requires hours or days of travel,” said Mayank Goel, a doctoral student on the
project team at the University of Washington, in a news release.
SpiroCall replicates the functioning of one of the key tools in assessing lung function —
the spirometer. By measuring how much air the lungs hold, how much they expel and
how they act and sound while they do so, much can be determined. And the developers
of SpiroCall made it possible to check all that just by breathing out into a regular phone.
“We wanted to be able to measure lung function on any type of phone you might
encounter around the world — smartphones, dumb phones, landlines, pay phones,” said
Shewak Patel, a UW professor on the team.
In 2012, when the project was just starting, it was a smartphone-only app. But over the
last few years the team has taken the data from more than 4,000 patients in the U.S.,
India and Bangladesh and made the service, essentially, cloud-based.
Users call a 1-800 number and, when prompted, simply exhale hard, emptying their
lungs of air. This sound is analyzed at a central location and the necessary statistics are
returned to the phone in the form of a text. That’s really all there is to it.
In tests, the readings came within 6.2 percent of readings from a commercial
spirometer, which is within the accepted margin of error. A 3D-printed “whistle” was also
designed to amplify the exhalations of people who are too ill to make much effort, or if
the microphone isn’t sensitive enough.
“The variation in phone/mic quality definitely affects the performance of the system, but
we perform regular diagnostic tests,” wrote Goel in an email to TechCrunch. The system
needs to know the make and model of the phone, but that’s simple to address.
Related Articles
High schooler's 3D printed 'mini-brain' bioreactor accelerates Zika research
PillDrill is a home medication scanning system for keeping track of prescriptions
SRI International spins off robotics project as Superflex, aiming at human
augmentation
If this sounds like the kind of thing that can and should be deployed worldwide — you’re
right! The team is hard at work on making that happen, but medical devices can’t be
Google I/O 2016 Keynote RecapVIDEO | 2:27 | NEWS
Everything You Need To Know From The 2016 Google I/O Keynote12 HOURS AGO | GREG KUMPARAK
460 SHARES
hurried out.
“Our current clinical trials are laying the groundwork for our FDA 510(k) clearance. We
expect to start the formal data collection for the clearance later this year,” wrote Goel.
“There is a significant amount of commercial interest around the technology in terms of
licensing as well as collaboration.”
It certainly has the makings of a successful university spin-off company, but it’ll be some
time before it can be deployed in anything other than an experimental capacity.
The team will present its most recent paper — detailing the process of analyzing a
patient’s breathing over the phone and all its attendant algorithms and noise reduction
techniques — at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI 2016 conference this
weekend. You can read it ahead of time here.
From the Web by Taboola Sponsored Links
Appy Pie
Appy Pie
Create Your App Without Coding on Appy Pie
Create An App For Your Business Without Coding
FEATURED STORIES