Development and Feasibility Studies of a Device for Early Prediction of Asthma Attack

Abstract

Asthma is one of the most dreaded diseases affecting a huge number of people worldwide. The most effective way to prevent its occurrence is by predicting it at an early stage. In this paper, we propose a noninvasive, easy to use, inexpensive prognostic asthma monitoring device to prevent its occurrence by taking well-timed precautions and medications. The existing asthma predictors use multiple sensors and are costly and beyond the reach of common people. The novelty of this work is development of a wearable, inexpensive, easy-to-use device that evaluates three asthma physiological variables using a single temperature sensor to monitor the asthma status of the asthmatic patient. The proposed device uses a temperature sensor to track the respiration temperature. A computational device then processes simple but powerful algorithms to evaluate the respiration rate and the rate of exhaled breath temperature. We recruited 189 subjects for proof of concept demonstration and found reasonably satisfactory performance of the device.