With SpiroCall, you can call a 1-800 number, blow into the phone, and use the telephone network to test your lung function
With SpiroCall, you can call a 1-800 number, blow into the phone, and use the telephone network to test your lung function
Most people in the developing world who have asthma, cystic fibrosis, or other chronic lung diseases have no way to measure how well their lungs are functioning outside of a clinic or doctor visit. But many do have access to a phone, though it may be a 10-year-old flip phone or a landline instead of the latest app-driven smartphone.
With that in mind, researchers have developed SpiroCall, a health-sensing tool that can accurately measure lung function over a phone call. Testing shows that SpiroCall’s results are within 6.2 per cent of results from clinical spirometers used in hospitals. It meets the medical community’s standards for accuracy.
“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,” says Shwetak Patel, professor of computer science & engineering and electrical engineering at the University of Washington. “With SpiroCall, you can call a 1-800 number, blow into the phone, and use the telephone network to test your lung function.”
The researchers will present a paper on the device at the Association for Computing Machinery’s CHI 2016 conference. In 2012, researchers from the UbiComp Lab introduced SpiroSmart — which lets people monitor their lung function by blowing into smartphones. The patients take a deep breath in and exhale as hard and fast as they can until they can’t exhale any more. The phone’s microphone senses sound and pressure from that exhalation and sends the data to a central server, which uses machine learning algorithms to convert the data into standard measurements of lung function.
“People have to manage chronic lung diseases for their entire lives,” says lead author Mayank Goel, a computer science and engineering doctoral student. “So there’s a real need to have a device that allows patients to monitor their condition at home without having to constantly visit a doctor, which in some places requires hours or days of travel.”
