By Sruthi K

Pulmonary function tests are now promisingly closer to everyone who owns a Smartphone. Everyone with an itch in the respiratory track has some introduction to the spirometer- the tube that the doc asks you to blow into before telling you how much help your lungs need. And some times, that it is too late. This may be avoided by running spirometer checks more frequently. What could be more convenient and handy than a mobile phone application to do that? Such an app has been developed by the researchers at University of Washington, UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s hospital.

The spirometer measures the amount of air that is blown into the tube till the patient is exhausted. There are also several other parameters associated with it to check the patient’s lung power and give respective spiro-graphs on a digital screen. The medicos can thus determine the presence of foreign bodies in the respiratory tract or any obstructions to free flow of breath. There are applications that are a poor mimic of the system, but all these results depend on the proximity to the mobile phone and other intensity of external disturbances. The new app overcomes all these difficulties and has been proven medically suitable unlike it’s counterparts.

The ‘Patel’s group’ performed an experiment using a smartphone and kept track of a person’s coughs all day, and now his students extended the research to lung functions using just that.

This bunch of researches modeled a human trachea and vocal tract to replace the spirometer and used the phone to detect the resonating frequency of sound waves within that tract.These in turn talk about what the doc needs to know. “

Let us hope they save us a few hundred dollars and leave us with one less thing to worry about and a hundred others.

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