Indiana Doctor Discusses His Device to Test Oxygen Levels...

STATEWIDE–May is National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month. One doctor has invented a device that can help patients test their lung function simply by using their smartphone.

Asthma is a common long-term inflammatory disease of the airways. It is characterized by variable and recurring symptoms and reduced lung function. Symptoms include episodes of wheezing, coughing, chest tightness, and shortness of breath.

Dr. Erick Forno is a Professor of Pediatrics and Vice-Chair for Clinical Research in the Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine and Riley Children’s Hospital. He says his device is a game-changer for people living with conditions like asthma and cystic fibrosis.

“We have tools that we can use in the clinic and in the hospital to lung function for our patients, but it’s a little bit harder to do this at home. And so that’s where the idea came for this new device, for this new approach that we’re calling AWARE. That’s the initials for Acoustic Waveform Respiratory Evaluation, and AWARE for short. And really, that’s the complicated name for this device. It basically uses smartphones that a lot of us already own and use on a day-to-day basis to try to measure or approximate lung function and monitor lung health in patients with asthma, with COPD, with other lung diseases,” said Forno.

Forno says they have a small adapter.

“That adapter covers the speaker and the microphone, and through a tube connects to a mouthpiece that you put in your mouth. And what it does is the smartphone then emits using the speakers on the phone, it emits sound pulses, so sound waves, and they travel through this adapter on the tube into your mouth and into the airways. And it’s just the sound that then gets reflected from the airway, sort of like an echo,” said Forno.

After that, Forno says it travels back into the microphone and picks it up. Then a lot of computing happens in the phone.

“That recreates sort of a map of how patent, how open, how wide open, or how obstructed your airways might be. If you think about it, it’s sort of like a sonar, the way dolphins map where they’re going, this is the same idea using sound pulses and the reflecting echo that then the smartphone processes,” said Forno.

It is still in the testing phase and they are currently enrolling patients for a clinical research study.

“If you’re interested in testing this AWARE device to see how accurate it can be to help diagnose asthma, cystic fibrosis, COPD, and other conditions, and how close it can approximate and measure your lung function, we have a clinical trial that’s a research study that is ongoing. We are taking both pediatric and adult patients, so all the way from eight years to 70 years of age. We want healthy volunteers. We need to know what’s normal when we’re measuring this,” said Forno.

If you’re interested, the number to call is 317-626-6937 or you can just reach out to the Riley Children’s Foundation or to Riley Hospital and ask for the Pulmonary Department.

Roughly 1 in 10 adults in Indiana expericne asthma. About 1 in 15 Indiana children deal with asthma. That equates to over 536,000 Indiana adults and roughly 95,000 children have asthma.

Indiana Doctor Discusses His Device to Test Oxygen Levels for Asthma was originally published on wibc.com