A team of Rice University students made an impression on health care investigators at the first ever mHealthSys Workshop, an international workshop on integrating mobile computing applications and health care services. Their innovation, the MobileSpiro, is a portable device designed to measure lung capacity in children with asthma. It won the top demonstration prize at the Seattle gathering.
The team of Baker College sophomores Peter Chang and Hasitha Dharmasiri, Lovett College junior Nonso Anyigbo and alumnus Sid Gupta ’07 was among six academic teams to present papers and seven to demonstrate their devices for judges. They finished second in the paper competition. Chang and Dharmasiri attended the event.
Last spring, the students paired their spirometer with the work of a Rice team that developed a game, “Azmo the Dragon,” intended to make it fun for children who suffer from asthma to check their lung capacity, as many are required to do daily. The program finished third in the Game Design category at Microsoft’s high-profile Imagine Cup.
Spirometers are widely used to measure the volume of air inhaled and exhaled, but commercially available devices are expensive, all costing more than $500, according to the paper presented at the Seattle workshop. The Rice team priced component costs for its version at no more than $100 when the parts are manufactured in large quantities, with results almost as accurate as a lab spirometer.
One component that makes the MobileSpiro special is a Bluetooth transmitter that sends results to the Android device for capture and analysis, but the students are equally excited about their open-source code.
Chang said the team spent a lot of time at the beginning getting up to speed on the health care issues involved. “The first stage was looking through the literature and talking to doctors to see what was out there and what problems we could solve by merging or creating technology,” he said.
The team found that spirometers “typically require a doctor or technician to be present. We developed automated error-detection algorithms to ensure the patient is doing the test correctly,” he said. Such tests require a patient to breathe as deeply as possible and then exhale with maximum effort. The ideal test would be one continuous cycle, with no coughing, hesitation or other interruption that could skew the results.
What young patients will ultimately experience is a game that will be fun to play, perhaps even with other asthma sufferers over a social network. It also may someday give researchers hooks into a stream of data that could prove valuable in many ways, not only about groups of patients but also environmental conditions in a region.
(Source: Rice University News & Media)