Brisbane, Australia-based ResApp is planning to re-do its big US trial soon, but in the meantime the smartphone respiratory diagnosis company is continuing to collect data in its native country. The company released data yesterday from a clinical study of more than 1,300 adult patients at Joondalup Health Campus in Perth and Wesley Hospital in Brisbane. While the company's previous studies have focused on a particular condition, this is the first real-world study of patients with a wide variety of diagnoses. Patients presented with a range of respiratory conditions, including some with no condition at all. "Delivering accurate results within an adult intended use population is an excellent step forward, further demonstrating that ResApp's algorithms can be applied effectively in a group of patients with a very broad range of respiratory illnesses," Tony Keating, CEO and managing director of ResApp Health, said in a statement.

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.