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Tan Hui Keng, a 71-year-old patient with heart failure, has to go to the hospital emergency every time she starts to gasp. This happens about twice a year.
Soon, a home-based device will be able to tell patients like Mrs. Tan early if their shortness of breath is caused by potential heart failure or other medical problem.
The device checks the accumulation of fluid in the lungs, which causes shortness of breath and is one of the first symptoms of heart failure. It was developed by a team from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), which introduced the prototype yesterday.
Patients simply place a small sensor on their chest or back. This captures the sounds of their lungs and sends them via a mobile application to a server in the cloud. The server has an artificial intelligence algorithm that determines whether the patient's lungs are cleared or if a fluid is accumulating there.
The whole process only takes 10 seconds, said Associate Professor Ser Wee from the NTU University's Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
Associate Professor David Foo, head of cardiology at TTSH, said that this device could help reduce the number of admissions to the hospital.
Current methods of detecting fluid accumulation in the lungs involve either a doctor or a stethoscope to listen to the patient's – which may be subjective – chest radiography or CT scan, which are expensive and take time, he added.
According to Professor Foo, this device will benefit every year about 30% of the approximately 5,000 patients admitted to US hospitals for heart failure.
According to a study conducted among 86 patients with TTSH between 2012 and 2015, the device was shown to have a precision rate of over 92% for the identification of patients with fluid accumulation. in the lungs.
This is comparable to conventional diagnostic methods such as X-rays and CT scans.
The next step will be to conduct a larger-scale study of approximately 300 patients with TTSH, starting next month or early next year, Professor Ser said.
The team has filed a patent for the device. He has also been approached by a major pharmaceutical company as well as by multinational and local healthcare companies for possible collaborations.
Prof Ser said the device could cost patients between $ 100 and $ 200.
Another device that also monitors the accumulation of fluid in the lungs, but uses resistance to electric current, is being tested by the Israeli company RS Medical Monitoring.
Lungs containing fluid build up are less resistant to electrical current than healthy lungs.
However, Professor Ser said that this method is less accurate than the team's algorithm because the resistance to electric current can also depend on other factors such as blood density and concentration, as well only tissues.
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