NewPneu: A Novel Cost Effective mHealth System for Diagnosing Childhood Pneumonia in Low-Resource Settings

Pneumonia is the primary factor that kills many children especially in areas with limited resource settings. The current approach to diagnosing pneumonia involves the use of the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI), which contains guidelines for observing high risk signs for early detection. However, due to lack of point of care monitoring devices, these observations are either inaccurate, invalid or costly. Furthermore, several mHealth solutions do not detect this disease and only provide guidelines.In this work, we propose a new low-cost system that captures biomedical data as recommended by doctors to identify Pneumonia. Among the system components, the hub unit is the critical element that collects biometric data from sensors, and samples it. Afterwords, the data is transmitted in real time via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio to a mobile Android-based device. The hub design is based on nRF52832 - Nordic Semiconductors microcontroller due to its low cost and high-speed ADC (i.e., SAADC). The time complexity of all software digital processing and band-pass filtering techniques for the hub is equal to O(1). The design is validated by examining the linear relationship between the applied and calculated frequencies (R
²
=1). Our real-world analysis reveals that there are more than 70% correlations for the SPO2 data, and more than 90% correlations for the RR data. This is captured between the gold standard measurements and our device. To further justify the accuracy, the two methods used to demonstrate that they are within the Line of Agreements (LoA) in terms of SpO2, based on Bland Altman analysis (i.e., lower and upper Line of Agreements (LoAs) are equal to 1.4 and 2.0; respectively). Furthermore, the accuracy in terms of RR is mostly within 2.8 and 3.6 LoAs. In comparison to the BioSignalPlux hub - PLUX Wireless Biosignals S.A., the battery life of this new design lasts for seven days compared to twenty-four hours for BioSignalPlux. The new hub is compact and can be packaged in a small case. Furthermore, the hub costs $10 USD in comparison to the BioSignalPlux and the Contec device that range from approximately $1,000 to $6,000 USD.