Study: Smartphone app that listens to breathing, determines respiratory diseases is 89 percent accurate

A smartphone-based system for diagnosing respiratory diseases achieved an accuracy of 89 percent in a recent clinical study of 524 pediatric patients conducted by the company at Joondalup Health Campus (JHC) and Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) in Perth, Western Australia. Perth-based ResApp essentially uses the smartphone microphone as a stethoscope to listen to a patient's breathing. But instead of relying solely on a doctor's ears to form a diagnosis from those sounds, ResApp has been developing machine-learning algorithms that will automatically determine which respiratory condition a patient might have, including pneumonia, asthma, bronchiolitis and COPD. In the future, the company hopes to integrate those algorithms into telehealth offerings as well as making them available for clinical use. ResApp released data from this trial previously in November, but that data set included fewer patients.