Small Gadgets That Make You Healthier

Image: Mark Allen Miller

At any moment, someone in the U.S. most likely is having an asthma attack. The breath-robbing disease afflicts around 25 million Americans, and every year about half of them lose control of their asthma. They may rush to the emergency room or reach for a rescue inhaler, a source of quick-acting drugs that can relax constricted airways in minutes. Predicting who is at risk of such crises is difficult, however, because the relevant statistics that would identify trends come from the patients' own recollections days or weeks after the emergency.

In several U.S. cities, a new technology may change that. In Louisville, Ky., in parts of California and in Washington State, asthma patients are using rescue inhalers topped with a small sensor that wirelessly broadcasts when, where and how often the device is used. The data pass through a secure server to patients' mobile phones and a physician's Web dashboard, providing an instant record of how well a patient is doing and archiving the information for future reference.

The device and data-monitoring system?which are collectively called Asthmapolis and which were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last July?constitute just one example of an emerging strategy in a movement so new that no one has yet coined a catchy name for it. That movement holds great promise because it combines traditional medical record keeping and public health surveillance with data mining and mobile phone technologies. Together these tools produce deep, up-to-date reports that can benefit patients and medical researchers, as well as public health and environmental authorities, all at the same time.

?If you think about the driving forces that are going to shape health care for the next 20 to 30 years, three things stand out: major aging in the population, massive growth of chronic disease, not enough caregivers,? says Steven DeMello, director of health care at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at the University of California, Berkeley. DeMello says that mobile diagnosis and surveillance could help blunt the impact of changing demographic trends by recognizing health crises early, by providing connections for remote care and by giving patients enough information to gain control of their disorder.

First Breath

Asthmapolis emerged from co-founder David Van Sickle's frustration with government asthma data, a feeling that burgeoned after he received his Ph.D. and while he was serving as a disease detective in the National Asthma Control Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ?Despite all that we know about asthma and how to treat it, the majority of individual patients actually have uncontrolled disease,? he says. ?Their physicians can't course-correct, because patients don't report how poorly they're doing, and so they end up at higher risk of ER visits, hospitalizations, missed days of school and work?and that's all below public health's radar.?

Van Sickle realized that patients were already carrying around devices that could objectively report their status: rescue inhalers. Most asthma patients take slow-acting drugs daily to keep their condition in check; repeated use of an inhaler signals a developing emergency. Beginning in 2006, Van Sickle and several partners created a wireless sensor that is now being tested in various settings. In Louisville, for example, researchers are using the device to identify local environmental triggers of asthma; in Sacramento, the focus is on proper follow-up care.

The Louisville project's sponsor is the municipal government. Ted Smith, its director of innovation, says Louisville hopes to deploy at least 500 sensors to construct a yearlong portrait of the impact of the disease on the population and the role that the city's notably poor air quality plays in making it worse. The Sacramento project is based inside Woodland Healthcare and Mercy Medical Group, two subsidiaries of the health care system Dignity Health. The goal is to test whether patients' health is improved by real-time feedback of their symptoms to their physicians. Michael Patmas, Woodland's chief medical officer, says the project may benefit other patients as well. First, many local asthma patients are farmworkers whose dusty outdoor work provokes their attacks; better management of their health might keep them out of the ER and thus reduce overcrowding. Plus, comparing the aggregated data from the patients' sensors with local weather reports could allow the hospital to alert all patients to possible risks through, for example, short text messages (SMS). ?If it's dry, and it's hot, and the wind is blowing in a certain direction, we can send an SMS warning: ?Bad weather conditions today,'? Patmas says.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=dda3d3c3c36640061db354dd9d0bbf19

obama sings al green heidi klum and seal ohare airport etta james songs east west shrine game underworld awakening haywire