Context-aware solutions for asthma condition management: a survey

The evolution of information technology has allowed the development of ubiquitous, user-centred, and context-aware solutions. This article considers existing context-aware systems supporting asthma management with the aim of describing their main benefits and opportunities for improvement. To achieve this, the main concepts related to asthma and context awareness are explained before describing and analysing the existing context-aware systems aiding asthma. The survey shows that the concept of personalisation is the key when developing context-aware solutions supporting asthma management because of the high level of heterogeneity of this condition. Hence, the benefits and challenges of context-aware systems supporting asthma management are strongly linked to contextual Just-In-Time information of internal and external factors related to a person and the heterogeneity it represents

Long-term monitoring of respiratory metrics using wearable devices

Recently, there has been an increased interest in monitoring health using wearable sensors technologies however, few have focused on breathing. The utility of constant monitoring of breathing is currently not well understood, both for general health as well as respiratory conditions such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) that have significant prevalence in society. Having a wearable device that could measure respiratory metrics continuously and non-invasively with high adherence would allow us to investigate the significance of ambulatory breathing monitoring in health and disease management. The purpose of this thesis was to determine if it was feasible to continuously monitor respiratory metrics. To do this, we identified pulse oximetry to provide the best balance between use of mature signal processing methods, commercial availability, power efficiency, monitoring site and perceived wearability. Through a survey, it was found users would monitor their breathing, irrespective of their health status using a smart watch. Then it was found that reducing the duty cycle and power consumption adversely affected the reliability to capture accurate respiratory rate measurements through pulse oximetry. To account for the decreased accuracy of PPG derived respiratory rate at higher rates, a long short-term memory (LSTM) network and a U-Net were proposed, characterised and implemented. In addition to respiratory rate, inspiration time, expiration time, inter-breath intervals and the Inspiration:Expiration ratio were also predicted. Finally, the accuracy of these predictions was validated using pilot data from 11 healthy participants and 11 asthma participants. While percentage bias was low, the 95\% limits of agreement was high. While there is likely going to be enthusiastic uptake in wearable device use, it remains unseen whether clinical utility can be achieved, in particular the ability to forecast respiratory status. Further, the issues of sensor noise and algorithm performance during activity was not calculated. However, this body of work has investigated and developed the use of pulse oximetry, classical signal processing and machine learning methodologies to extract respiratory metrics to lay a foundation for both the hardware and software requirements in future clinical research

In Vitro Models for Studying Respiratory Host-Pathogen Interactions.

Respiratory diseases and lower respiratory tract infections are among the leading cause of death worldwide and, especially given the recent severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 pandemic, are of high and prevalent socio-economic importance. In vitro models, which accurately represent the lung microenvironment, are of increasing significance given the ethical concerns around animal work and the lack of translation to human disease, as well as the lengthy time to market and the attrition rates associated with clinical trials. This review gives an overview of the biological and immunological components involved in regulating the respiratory epithelium system in health, disease, and infection. The evolution from 2D to 3D cell biology and to more advanced technological integrated models for studying respiratory host-pathogen interactions are reviewed and provide a reference point for understanding the in vitro modeling requirements. Finally, the current limitations and future perspectives for advancing this field are presented