Health IT, Startups, Diagnostics

Can a smartphone app to diagnose respiratory diseases rival traditional testing methods?

ResApp has developed a smartphone app that uses audio samples of a patient's cough to diagnose acute respiratory diseases. A U.S. pediatric study will assess how the app stacks up against respiratory tests conducted by hospitals to diagnose patients.

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An Australian telehealth startup that developed a smartphone app to detect common respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia, has begun a study at three U.S. hospitals. ResApp Health‘s smartphone diagnostic app will interpret audio samples of coughs and compare those results with tests run by hospitals taking part in the study. The goal will be to determine whether there is a way for physicians to use the app to diagnose respiratory conditions over the phone and save patients the cost of an in-person doctor’s visit and lab tests.

In a phone interview with MedCity News, ResApp CEO Tony Keating said the study, which is being conducted at Texas Children’s Medical Center, Cleveland Clinic, and Massachusetts General, will seek to assess the coughs of 1,000 children aged 29 days to 12 years old with its ResAppDx app. The app will try to detect conditions such as pneumonia, the most common reasons for children’s hospitalization, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Keating noted that ResAppDx was able to distinguish between asthma, pneumonia, pediatric reactive airways disease, croup, and upper respiratory tract infection.

In an overview of the study, Keating said that nurses and other providers at the hospitals taking part in the study record the coughs of pediatric patients. The diagnosis by the app is compared with the diagnosis based on listening with a stethoscope, imaging, and lab tests. The study results will be used for a de novo U.S. Food and Drug Administration premarket submission later this year, according to an email from the company’s U.S. PR.

“[Study participants] are recruited and tested at the same time,” Keating said. “At this stage, we are on target for completing recruitment by the end of March. We had a delay but that was good because we have hit the peak for the U.S. winter and flu season.”

Asked if the smartphone-enabled app would compete with digital stethoscopes, Keating said in some ways ResApp’s approach offered a more practical approach for distribution than digital stethoscopes. But he didn’t regard them as competing technologies.

Prior to the U.S. study, Keating said ResApp assessed 1,200 people in Australia for pneumonia through a study by University of Queensland backed by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That study had a 90 percent rate of accuracy, Keating noted.

If the FDA clears the app, the initial plan is for the app to be used by physicians. Keating hopes that it will eventually be available as an over-the-counter diagnostic device for consumers.

Photo: Bigstock

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