Innovative development of the inspired sinewave device to measure lung functions and inhomogeneity for diagnosis and evaluations of early lung diseases

Abstract

Surprisingly, lung disease is still one of the leading causes of deaths in the developed countries, including UK. According to the UK National Health Service (NHS), Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is the fifth biggest killer disease in the UK, killing approximately 25,000 people a year. This problem is even worse in developing countries such as Vietnam, India and China, where air pollution is a big problem and the disease awareness is under-recognised. The NHS has set out one of its challenges is to identify people with lung disease earlier in the disease’s development pathway, in order to provide more effective and timely intervention and treatment. This paper presents a novel Inspired Sinewave Device (ISD) to measure lung function and inhomogeneity. Both set of information are important for diagnosis and detection of early lung diseases. ISD has the potential to replace or supplement the traditional spirometry in the routine lung function testing. The paper describes both the principle of ISD and a set of experimental results demonstrating the capability of ISD to asymptotically detect asthmatic symptoms. Finally the paper discusses the future plan, including the testing of 300+, COPD patients at the Oxford Respiratory Trials Unit in UK, and the potential collaborations among research institutions in Vietnam and UK about cost-effective and innovative developments of smart devices, biosensors, lab-on-chips and telehealth solutions for the routine lung function testing, diagnosis and evaluations of early lung diseases.