Wearable cough registration to assess children’s asthma control

Asthma is a common disease amongst Dutch children, with an occurrence of 23%. In order to achieve good asthma control, regular contact with a health care provider is advised, but however not always feasible. Telehealthcare therefore might offer a solution. The majority of current telehealthcare systems for asthma are based upon questionnaires; while children’s’ and parents’ perception of asthma control is not always reliable. This research focus on one of the common symptoms of asthma; coughing, which shows promise as a diagnostic tool for asthma.

The objective is to find which parameters revealed by cough measurements, reflect the asthma control as assessed by an exercise challenge test (ECT).

Physicians will speak of an 'asthma cough' and while coughing is one of the symptoms of asthma, the specificity of coughing as a predictor for asthma is known to be low.
It is hypothesized that the coughs and it's derived parameters, reflect the patients asthma control.

Every week 3-4 patients are asked to participate.

These patient were recruited based on the already clinically scheduled asthma patient for an exercise challenge test (ECT).

-4 weeks before ECT: recruitment of patients.

-3 weeks before ECT: informed consent.

-2 weeks before ECT: instruction and start using wearables, for 1 week.

-0 weeks before ECT: exercise challenge test

- Wearing several devices; an accelerometer for 4 times 12 consecutive hours to measure cough sounds, an accelerometer to monitor physical activity for a full week an wearing of an ECG-device during phsyical activity.

- Using a spirometer whilst wearing the wearables.

- Filling in 3 questionnaires at the end of the monitoring period; the C-ACT, the PAQLQ and a custom questionnaire to evaluate the use of an accelerometer in a non-conventional way.