Development and testing of a digital health assistant for pediatric asthma patients

Asthma is the most relevant chronic respiratory disease worldwide, affecting millions of children and adolescents both in low-middle-income countries and high-income countries. In low-resource settings, the level of asthma control for children and young adolescents is dramatically low, because of their poor medication adherence and insufficient disease monitoring. Alex is a digital health assistant (DHA) for longitudinal telemonitoring of asthma, able to provide children with a personal coach assistant interface and an innovative data-collecting platform, that will record multiple asthma biomarkers coming from different active and passive monitoring devices. This study focused on the development of an innovative spirometer collector, to be embedded in Alex’s longitudinal monitoring: by exploiting an innovative user interface, the application aims to increase pediatric asthma patients’ motivation when performing spirometry tests, to mitigate their insufficient disease monitoring. Alex also aims to improve the poor medication adherence of pediatric asthma patients: by utilizing an open-source smart inhaler sensor, to detect whenever patients use their therapeutic inhaler during the day. So, this study focused also on the design, 3D-print, and testing of three distinct fixation systems, that aim to fix the smart inhaler sensor used by Alex DHA on three different types of inhalers between 10 and 19 years old.