Remote Pulmonary Function Test Monitoring in Cloud Platform via Smartphone Built-in Microphone

With an aging population that continues to grow, health care technology plays an increasingly active role, especially for chronic disease management. In the health care market, cloud platform technology is becoming popular, as both patients and physicians demand cost efficiency, easy access to information, and security. Especially for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients, it is recommended that pulmonary function test (PFT) be performed on a daily basis. However, it is difficult for patients to frequently visit a hospital to perform the PFT. In this study, we present an application and cloud platform for remote PFT monitoring that can be directly measured by smartphone microphone with no external devices. In addition, we adopted the IBM Watson Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform for PFT monitoring, using a smartphone’s built-in microphone with a high-resolution time-frequency representation. We successfully demonstrated real-time PFT monitoring using the cloud platform. The PFT parameters of FEV1/FVC (%) could be remotely monitored when a subject performed the PFT test. As a pilot study, we tested 13 healthy subjects, and found that the absolute error mean was 4.12 and the standard deviation was 3.45 on all 13 subjects. With the developed applications on the cloud platform, patients can freely measure the PFT parameters without restriction on time and space, and a physician can monitor the patients’ status in real time. We hope that the PFT monitoring platform will work as a means for early detection and treatment of patients with pulmonary diseases, especially those having asthma and COPD.