mobile-and-connected-health

The first mobile health system that turns a commodity smartphone into a fully functional pulmonary examination device to measure the internal physiological conditions of human airways, such as airway caliber, obstruction and possible inflammation. Information about these airway conditions could provide vital clues for precise and objective pulmonary disease evaluation.

This work prsents AWARE, a new sensing and AI system that supports accurate and reliable pulmonary function tests (PFT) using commodity smartphones. AWARE uses a smartphone to transmit acoustic signals and reconstructs the profile of human airway based on the analysis of reflected acoustic waves captured from the smartphone’s microphone. The subject’s pulmonary condition is then evaluated by a multi-task learning model to detect airway obstruction and inflammation and identify pulmonary diseases like asthma or COPD.

We present a new technique to mimic an active sonar system with the smartphone’s built-in microphone and speaker, and use this sonar system to evaluate muscle fatigue from the muscle’s surface characteristics that can be measured from the transmitted acoustic signal.

The first work that allows commodity smartphones to be used as a portable spirometer and provide accuracy lung function test results on par with clinical-grade spirometers. This is a collaborative work with the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and could also potentially contribute to in-home evaluation of COVID-19 risks by allowing convenient out-of-clinic lung function evaluation.