A Novel Tele-Medicine System to Improve Therapy Monitoring in Chronic Respiratory Diseases

Abstract

In this work we proposed a novel tele-medicine system called Smart Breath Network (SBN) with the perspective to improve the life of patients affected by a well-known respiratory disease called Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). The main therapy for COPD is home-assisted ventilation that requires frequent home intervention by specialized hospital staff in order to adjust dispensing and to verify the effectiveness of the therapy. Moreover, healthcare services need to improve the care of patients with difficult access to services, particularly those in rural or remote areas without sustaining high costs of service maintenance. The SBN system tries to fill the gap between healthcare services, that need to take care of a growing number of home-assisted COPD patients due to the today’s alarming air pollution. The SBN network gathers all patient’s respiratory data from Smart Breath Analyzers (SBAs) devices that are low-cost, simple to use, compact-sized devices that fit to almost any ventilator with bi-tube capabilities.