SBIR Phase II: Voice-based telehealth interface for symptom monitoring and screening for chronic and acute respiratory diseases

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是部署在移动设备上的基于语音的远程医疗接口，用于症状监测和呼吸道疾病筛查。这项技术可以提高呼吸护理的质量，并通过向医疗保健提供者和患者提供监测和恶化警告来防止昂贵的住院治疗。慢性和急性呼吸道疾病影响着7000多万美国人和全球10亿人。这项技术可能有助于改善患者的预后，并节省患者护理成本。拟议的项目将进一步发展现有的慢性阻塞性呼吸系统疾病(COPD)早期恶化预警系统，通过移动电话捕获的语音和呼吸数据来测量患者呼吸系统最早恶化的时间。研究目标包括(1)通过改进在不同现实环境中测量肺功能的算法以及在反映美国呼吸疾病患者的目标人群的数据集上改进肺功能测量来产生肺功能测量；(2)通过进一步训练具有导致住院、急诊科就诊以及新的或增加的药物和治疗处方的真实呼吸恶化的概念验证算法来产生恶化预测；(3)开发和推出直接面向患者的产品，目标是学习如何最有效地使患者参与使用，有效地与患者沟通，并弥合患者和提供者之间的差距，以提供及时和有效的干预；以及(4)通过对患有各种肺部疾病的患者测试产品来探索其他使用案例。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is a voice-based telehealth interface deployed on mobile devices for symptom monitoring and screening for respiratory diseases. This technology may improve the quality of respiratory care and could prevent costly hospitalizations by delivering monitoring and exacerbation warnings to healthcare providers and patients. Chronic and acute respiratory diseases affect over 70 million Americans and 1 billion people globally. This technology may help improve patient outcomes and save on patient care costs. The proposed project will further develop the existing Chronic Obstructive Respiratory Disease (COPD) Early Exacerbation warning system to measure the earliest deterioration in a patient’s respiratory system through voice and breath data captured through mobile phones. The research objectives include (1) productizing lung function measurement by improving algorithms for measuring lung function in varied real-world environments and on datasets reflective of the target population of patients with respiratory conditions in the US; (2) productizing exacerbation prediction by further training the proof-of-concept algorithm with true respiratory exacerbations resulting in hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and prescription of new or increased medication and treatments; (3) developing and launching a direct-to-patient product with the goals of learning how to most effectively engage the patient to drive usage, communicating effectively with the patient, and bridging the gap between patient and provider to provide timely and effective interventions; and (4) exploring additional use cases by testing products with patients who suffer from varied lung diseases.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.