A guardian angel for the respiratory system

Anyone suffering from a chronic respiratory disease knows that continuous monitoring of the disease helps to avoid, for example, life-threatening asthma attacks or even hospitalisation. However, the currently available monitoring methods - such as a peak flow meter or a symptom diary - require a great deal of effort.

This is where ETH spin-off Resmonics comes in with a fundamentally new method: monitoring respiratory symptoms using a smartphone. The smartphone records coughing activity at night and does so regularly, night after night. In the morning, a traffic light system indicates whether everything is in the green zone or whether further measures are required because the coughing pattern has changed. The patients do not have to do anything themselves, as it is sufficient to have the smartphone in the bedroom - as a guardian angel in the night, so to speak. The smartphone can be set to flight mode, because the technology does not need a connection to the network. This means that privacy is also protected.

Resmonics co-founder Peter Tinschert explains that this new method does not replace other monitoring methods, but complements them. If the traffic light is yellow in the morning, the system recommends to use a further measuring method to identify the cause of the deterioration. "This gives patients extra assurance in their daily lives without having to take action themselves," says Tinschert.

Cough analysis with Deep Learning

It all started with Peter Tinschert's doctoral thesis. Within a research collaboration between ETH, HSG and health insurer CSS, the goal was to develop a smartphone application for asthma sufferers. In 2016, he and co-founder Iris Shih started collecting data. It was important to them that the data could be collected without additional patient interaction, so that a later application could be fully autonomous. Therefore, recording and analysing coughing sounds with a smartphone was an obvious choice. Over the years, they collected important data material that, using artificial intelligence, led to software that can now be integrated into existing health apps. Peter Tinschert adds, "Digital health is often just a digital copy of analogue treatment. In contrast, we are measuring a new and meaningful parameter that has not been available to doctors and patients until now."

Resmonic's first product, ResGuard Med, is a certified medical device that is already in use. Because of the Corona virus, the product is currently getting a lot of attention and is attracting imitators, for example research projects that claim to detect a "Corona cough”. "These are early-stage research projects that are getting a lot of media coverage, but are still far from a real application," Tinschert explains.

One app for all

The software is constantly being developed and perfected, especially in terms of how it functions in different smartphones, because not all smartphones are equally good. Resmonics would like to see proactive partners from the industry who get involved in further development and dare to break new ground. Tinschert says the long-term goal is for smartphone-based symptom detection to become standard practice for respiratory disease management.

For now, however, all respiratory sufferers can rejoice, as a free app with Resmonics technology is available to everyone - for a more relaxed everyday life.