Smart wearable system to assist asthma patients

Abstract

Asthma is a perpetual lung infection that inflames and shortens the airways leading to intricacy in breathing. It affects 300 million human life globally out of which 20 million people are Indians, and every year about 2.5 lakh people die of asthma prematurely around the world. The estimation of asthma patients globally will exceed 100 million by the year 2025. All the deaths due to asthma are preventable with proper care and guidance [1]. This paper provides a user-friendly wearable device included with an android app that monitors the environmental factors faced by asthma patients as well as their health parameters and transmits the collected data to a cloud platform. The parameters are deliberated using special sensing element like temperature sensing unit, humidity sensing unit, gas sensor unit and pulse rate sensor unit. The evaluated parameters are the presence of polluted gas, abnormal temperature, humidity and pulse rate, and the specific location of the user. All these parameters are regularly updated in the display unit attached to the wearable device as well as in an android app, which consists of Asthma Symptom Test (AST) to predict the probability of asthma and it gives essential precautions to the patients by gathering details from the cloud which prevents them from provoking a severe attack. The proposed system was implemented and tested in real-time environment.