GeoMedicine Adding New Dimension to Asthma Research and Treatment
18 Jul 2013GPS leads way to advanced asthma research with inhaler sensors.
The GPS sensors are being placed inside asthma sufferer’s inhalers so that their location is tracked when they have an asthma attack. This lets researchers know if any environmental concerns are triggering the attacks.
David Van Sickle, an epidemiologist, is at the head of the research with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Shortly after receiving funding from the CDC, he funded Asthmapolis which is a company working on the GPS sensor in and device. It is a new inhaler with Bluetooth technology built in, specifically for the use of the study and collecting data.
“We’ll be looking for hot spots in cities,” said Meredith A. Barrett, a researcher at the Center for Health and Community at the University of California in San Francisco. “And you could take climate-change information and use this type of geolocated data” to help predict outcomes, says Barrett, an ecologist who examines how environmental factors affect health.
This isn’t the first time GPS technology has been used in healthcare; similar tracking devices have been installed in smartphones and medical devices to alert doctors of emergency situations with patients and provide location and monitoring data for different types of medical conditions. GPS technology has been used in walking canes, footwear for the blind, and for alzheimer’s and dementia patients.
According to theWashington Post, GPS technology is helping lead the way to new research offering more improved way of treating medical conditions. Aside from healthcare, GPS has also been used for things like tracking wildlife and providing navigation for individuals and different types of organizations.
The asthma GPS research began with inhalers outfitted with a small sensor and have gradually advanced to new Bluetooth-enabled devices. As the technology advances, scientists and doctors have more data to work with in order to reduce asthma attacks and learn more about environmental influences on their asthma.
Asthmapolis and their tracking inhalers are in a new field called “geomedicine” which uses geographic information system (GIS) technology to track environmental conditions and the associated health risks. The GPS inhaler developed by Van Sickle became an official medical device in July 2012 according theUS Food and Drug Administration.
Another lab working on asthma research data combined with technology is AT&T Labs. They have been developing a wireless asthma sensor called Asthma Trigger. This sensor will randomly scan the air’s condition and look for conditions that might cause asthma flare-ups. If it detects something in the air, the user’s mobile device will be alerted so they are aware of the current conditions. AT&T is also working on other healthcare and technology research including inhalers with Wi-Fi and GPS.
Researchers at Harvard and Saint Louis University are also joining in the asthma GPS research with an asthma alert messaging system that will also send alerts to the person’s smartphone.
“It’s these kinds of insights that we think will help us understand the origins of the disease,” Van Sickle says. Him and the rest of the researchers hope to learn more about what influence environmental conditions on asthma sufferers.
Comments are closed.