Asthma Attack-Warning Gadget To Be Launched Soon!
BENGALURU: A whisk of fresh air has started to travel towards Asthma patients and will be upon them as scientists at North Carolina State University are developing a wearable early warning system known as the Health and Environmental Tracker (HET). Though avoiding particular activities or situations has been really helping peeps with serious asthma, but even then due to our polluted environment attacks are quite inevitable.
This new technology will certainly help patients in minimizing asthma attacks. The set up consists of a wristband and chest patch, and helps the patients by monitoring their bodies and their environment as reported by Times of India. The set-up sends an alert when an attack may be imminent.
The movements, heart rate, respiratory rate and blood oxygenation of the wearer is tracked by the chest patch along with the wheezing sounds in their lungs. The chest patch comes with an adhesive such that it can easily be attached to the patient’s heart.
The motion, heart rate and blood oxygen level of the patients is detected by the wristband. It also monitors environmental factors such as airborne volatile organic compounds and ozone etc.
The data which is recorded by the two by the two devices are then sent to a smart-phone application wirelessly. The sent data also contains the lung-function readings from a non-wearable spirometer every time. The patient is warned in case an attack is likely to occur such that they can stop doing their current activity.
While, many systems are developed in the past as well, possessing all these features and promising great results, this device is different in sense that the wearer's movements and body heat is also monitored by this. "The uniqueness of this work is not simply the integration of various sensors in wearable form factors. The impact here is that we have been able to demonstrate power consumption levels that are in the sub-milliwatt levels by using nano-enabled novel sensor technologies. Comparable, existing devices have power consumption levels in the hundreds of milliwatts," said Prof. Veena Misra, Research team member.
The IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics published the research paper this week. It is expected that human trials of the system will commence in the next few months.
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