SpiroCall measures lung health over any phone no app

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Posted May 4, 2016 by Devin Coldewey

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Sometimes you see an application of technology thats so innovative and helpful you
cant believe it exists in this age of narcissistic and short-sighted startups. SpiroCall, a
service that lets anyone in the world call a toll-free number and have their lung health
evaluated over the phone, seems too good to be real but its real, and its good.
Lung disease causes hundreds of thousands of deaths per year, and chronic conditions
like asthma affect millions more and the problem is worse in remote areas, where the
doctors and equipment needed to detect such conditions are dicult to reach, if theyre
present at all.

Theres a real need to have a device that allows patients to accurately monitor their
condition at home without having to constantly visit a medical clinic, which in some
places requires hours or days of travel, said Mayank Goel, a doctoral student on the
project team at the University of Washington, in a news release.
SpiroCall replicates the functioning of one of the key tools in assessing lung function
the spirometer. By measuring how much air the lungs hold, how much they expel and
how they act and sound while they do so, much can be determined. And the developers
of SpiroCall made it possible to check all that just by breathing out into a regular phone.

We wanted to be able to measure lung function on any type of phone you might
encounter around the world smartphones, dumb phones, landlines, pay phones, said
Shewak Patel, a UW professor on the team.
In 2012, when the project was just starting, it was a smartphone-only app. But over the
last few years the team has taken the data from more than 4,000 patients in the U.S.,
India and Bangladesh and made the service, essentially, cloud-based.
Users call a 1-800 number and, when prompted, simply exhale hard, emptying their
lungs of air. This sound is analyzed at a central location and the necessary statistics are

returned to the phone in the form of a text. Thats really all there is to it.

In tests, the readings came within 6.2 percent of readings from a commercial
spirometer, which is within the accepted margin of error. A 3D-printed whistle was also
designed to amplify the exhalations of people who are too ill to make much effort, or if
the microphone isnt sensitive enough.
The variation in phone/mic quality denitely affects the performance of the system, but
we perform regular diagnostic tests, wrote Goel in an email to TechCrunch. The system
needs to know the make and model of the phone, but thats simple to address.

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If this sounds like the kind of thing that can and should be deployed worldwide youre
right! The team is hard at work on making that happen, but medical devices cant be

hurried out.
Our current clinical trials are laying the groundwork for our FDA 510(k) clearance. We
expect to start the formal data collection for the clearance later this year, wrote Goel.
There is a signicant amount of commercial interest around the technology in terms of
licensing as well as collaboration.
It certainly has the makings of a successful university spin-off company, but itll be some
time before it can be deployed in anything other than an experimental capacity.
The team will present its most recent paper detailing the process of analyzing a
patients breathing over the phone and all its attendant algorithms and noise reduction
techniques at the Association for Computing Machinerys CHI 2016 conference this
weekend. You can read it ahead of time here.
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