Project

Proposal
Justice Amoh
Prof. Andrew Campbell
COSC 169 Mobile Health
January 21st, 2015

Amoh 1

Smartphone App For Tracking Asthma Symptoms

Each year, 1.8 million emergency department visits in the United States alone result from
episodes of asthma.1 Even though self-management plans have been shown to reduce these
episodes by as much as 40%,2 patients rarely adhere to these plans and fail to manage their asthma.
For a patient, self-management regimes would involve manually recording one's symptoms such as
coughs and wheezes in special journals called asthma diaries. In addition, management plans
require patients to follow a predetermined action plan to address exacerbations. In practice,
however, laborious manual logging and human factors such forgetfulness deter patients from using
asthma diaries and action plans effectively. So for my COSC 169 project, I propose to develop a
smartphone app that employs embedded smartphone sensors to track asthma symptoms
and inform patients on their asthma conditions.
In devising such an app, we can consider two categories of asthma symptoms to monitor.
First, there are those symptoms we can sense using the standard inbuilt sensors of the smartphone.
Cough symptoms can be detected from the embedded microphone's audio stream using Hidden
Markov Model classiUiers.3 Larson et al have demonstrated that the same microphone can be also be
used to measure lung function at accuracies comparable to conventional spirometers.4 In addition,
wheeze and dyspnea(shortness of breadth) symptoms can be detected by similar classiUication and
acoustic processing techniques, although they are much quieter than coughs and might require the
use of microphones closer to patient's mouth like those in headphones and headsets. Besides these
acoustically detectable symptoms, there are also the more subjective symptoms that cannot be
measured through sensing. Fever, chest tightness and frequency of medication use are examples of
such symptoms and these can be monitored through Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA)
strategies.
Apart from symptom detection and logging, the proposed mHealth app should also inform
patients on their current asthma conditions and advise on necessary actions just as asthma diaries
and action plans do. A key speciUication of the app user interface is that it reports on how well
patient symptoms are being managed using standard color codes as seen in asthma diaries. It must
also be able to provide, in a simple readable format, a history of symptoms and any interesting
patterns in symptom occurrence. Additional features like a panic or call-my-doctor button and
location-based information on asthma triggers (pollen count, weather, humidity, etc.) can also be
very helpful to the asthma patient. In all, the app ought to have a very minimal yet functional and
informative UI, such that a user can easily keep themselves updated on their asthma status.
1

Ginde AA, Espinola JA, Camargo Jr CA. Improved overall trends but persistent racial disparities in emergency department
visits for acute asthma, 1993-2005. J Allergy Clin Immunol 2008;122(2):313-318.
2

P.G. Gibson, H. Powell, J. Coughlan, A.J. Wilson, M. Abramson, P. Haywood, A Bauman, MJ Hensley, and EH Walters. Selfmanagement education and regular practitioner review for adults with asthma. Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 3, 2002
3 Amoh,

Justice, and Kofi Odame. "Technologies for Developing Ambulatory Cough Monitoring Devices." Critical Reviews in
Biomedical Engineering 41.6 (2014).
4

Larson, Eric C., et al. "Spirosmart: Using a microphone to measure lung function on a mobile phone." Proceedings of the 2012
ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. ACM, 2012.