SpiroCall: Measuring Lung Function over a Phone Call
Medical Device Sensing
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Goel, Mayank
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Saba, Elliot
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Stiber, Maia
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Whitmire, Eric
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Fromm, Josh
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Larson, Eric C.
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Borriello, Gaetano
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Patel, Shwetak N.
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.5675-5685
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Cost and accessibility have impeded the adoption of spirometers (devices
that measure lung function) outside clinical settings, especially in
low-resource environments. Prior work, called SpiroSmart, used a smartphone's
built-in microphone as a spirometer. However, individuals in low- or
middle-income countries do not typically have access to the latest smartphones.
In this paper, we investigate how spirometry can be performed from any
phone-using the standard telephony voice channel to transmit the sound of the
spirometry effort. We also investigate how using a 3D printed vortex whistle
can affect the accuracy of common spirometry measures and mitigate usability
challenges. Our system, coined SpiroCall, was evaluated with 50 participants
against two gold standard medical spirometers. We conclude that SpiroCall has
an acceptable mean error with or without a whistle for performing spirometry,
and advantages of each are discussed.