An inhaler made by Propeller Health www.popscoi.com used for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, records the time and location each time a patient takes a puff of medication. The inhaler’s sensor uses Bluetooth to connect to a smartphone or to a data hub.
The device helps track not only patients when they self-medicate but also the geolocation data which is a help to public health officials. The coordinates can build a map of spots in a city where citizens are having problems breathing.
Ted Smith Chief of Civic Innovation for the Louisville Kentucky metro government http://louisvilleky.gov reports, “His city has always ranked in the top five or top ten worst places to live in this country if you have asthma or allergies.” Smith believes the data collected from the device can help shape health policy, environmental planning, and eventually help patients during doctor visits.
For example, if a patient lives or works in a problem area, the doctor may increase the dose of the patient’s maintenance medication or a nurse can call the patient and check on the patient if they know that the patient lives in a hazardous zone.
In one effort to study the effectiveness of inhalers, Smith gave out two varieties of inhalers in Louisville. One is the normal maintenance inhaler and the other is the rescue inhaler that is not used regularly but only used when a patients feels the oncoming symptoms of an asthma attack.
For 13 months, Louisville collected the frequency, time, and location for 5,400 users and next year, Louisville will be doing a similar initiative with 10,000 inhalers. A map is now available online.
Dr. Lawrence Madoff, Epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School www.umassmed.edu in Boston says, “This is a new trend in public health where the patient or the public is actually participating directly in their surveillance”.
Amiko, a start-up working on patient compliance by connecting an inhaler with a smart phone apt is able to provide reminders and feedback as to when the inhaler was used improperly and by mid-March 2015, the company hopes to test it with a few thousand patients.
Another new company becoming active in the field called Wren Scientific, is providing home care products to asthmatic patients. This company was one of six companies spun off in 2014 by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory www.jhuapl.edu located in Laurel Maryland.
Wren Scientific has developed the “Aerosol Indicator for Self-Use” which is a socially networked air quality monitor. The device is combined with a smart phone app to convert onboard camera data into aerosol observations. A user’s localized readings are mapped and shared in real time.