App spots respiratory illness as you cough into smartphone

An Australia-based digital health solution provider has developed an app that can diagnose respiratory diseases like pneumonia, croup and asthma with high accuracy through a cough into a smartphone, a media report said.

The app ResApp has been developed by Perth-based ResApp Health. A recent clinical study of 524 pediatric patients at the west Australian city's Joondalup Health Campus and Princess Margaret Hospital found that the smartphone-based system can achieve an overall accuracy of 89 percent, the West Australian reported.

ResApp has been developing machine-learning algorithms that will automatically determine which respiratory condition a patient might have, including pneumonia, asthma, bronchiolitis and COPD -- an umbrella term used to describe progressive lung diseases.

The company released data from this trial previously in November, but that data set included fewer patients.

The larger group is now starting to show ResApp's effectiveness in diagnosing less common conditions.

"We are pleased to again report high levels of accuracy on a dataset that is more than 50 percent larger than the previously used dataset," Tony Keating, CEO and managing director of ResApp, said in a statement.

"These updated results reaffirm the algorithm's clinical accuracy right before we enter the pivotal studies needed for our upcoming premarket submission to the US Food and Drug Administration," he added.

In addition, these preliminary results for the separation of bacterial and atypical pneumonia from viral pneumonia are very exciting as they demonstrate the power of ResApp's algorithm in supporting clinicians in making critical decisions for patient treatment," Keating noted.