Identi-wheez — A device for in-home diagnosis of asthma

Asthma is the most common chronic illness among children. The skills required to diagnose it make it an even greater concern. In this work, we present a child-friendly wearable device, which allows in-home diagnosis of asthma. The device acquires simultaneous measurements from multiple stethoscopes. The recordings are then sent to a specialist who uses assistive diagnosis algorithms that enable auscultation (listening to lung sounds with a stethoscope) at any location in the lungs volume by sound refocusing. The specialist is also presented with a sound “heat map” which shows the location of sound sources in the lungs. We present design considerations of our device, as well as the algorithms for assistive diagnosis and their analysis which demonstrate reduction of ambient and measurement noise by over 10dB.