The Magic Behind Aeris
What if you could detect a problem in your asthmatic child’s lungs before symptoms like coughing escalate? The average time to the peak of symptoms is 5 days. Recovery takes an additional 6 days. What if you could catch this before symptoms appear and immediately start the recovery process?
The technology to do this already exists, and it’s called spirometry. It’s trapped in the hospital because these devices cost thousands of dollars. It also requires a trained respiratory therapist to coach you through it. Therefore, it doesn’t even exist at most hospitals. Even if your child gets a chance to do this test in the hospital, it happens so infrequently. Chances are, you’ll miss an upcoming life-threatening attack. If this technology isn’t brought closer to asthmatics, the power of spirometry will be left as a hidden treasure.
What if I asked you to blow out all the air from your lungs? Now do this for 6 seconds.
We’ve built Aeris, an asthma management tool with a portable spirometer that’s as accurate as the devices in the hospital. This information is relayed onto our app over bluetooth, which tracks lung health over time.
How do we make kids do something every day? By making it a game! Using our device as the controller, kids can navigate the skies on a hot air balloon. The only way to get to your next destination everyday is through blasting out into the atmosphere. This is when we collect spirometry and ensure that kids are performing the test properly.
Once you arrive at this new city, you’ll hear a story. This is how we keep them engaged over time.
These are the spirometry loops that pulmonologists care about, with our results in green, overlaid onto the hospital-grade spirometer results. The degree of “scoopiness” in the descending portion of the graph indicates the degree of airway tract obstruction. Obstruction occurs before symptoms like coughing or wheezing appear and this is when action should be taken. Pulmonologists also look at these graphs to determine if spirometry was performed correctly. That’s why we’re implementing a machine learning algorithm to classify these measurements, so that only properly collected measurements are acted upon. We will ensure that only properly collected spirometry measurements are accepted and acted upon. The work behind this technology is the portion that has just been granted a $225K NSF Award, as of last week.
Early detection of airflow obstruction is a crucial factor in providing asthma effective management. Spirometry needs to be user-friendly and understandable in order to be used at home. At KNOX, this is what we are going to achieve.
