Exhaled breath monitoring during home ventilo-therapy in COPD patients by a new distributed tele-medicine system

Abstract

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the world, and leads to a substantial burden on healthcare services. Effective and timely management of patients with COPD has been essential to alleviate COPD exacerbation, improve the quality of life, and consequently reduce the economic burden. To achieve this, we propose an innovative tele-medicine system based on Smart Breath Analyzer (SBA) device and devoted to the tele-monitoring of exhaled air in patients suffering chronic respiratory failure and home-assisted by mechanical ventilation. In this work the main characteristics of the developed tele-medicine system are presented together with preliminary pre-clinical test results. The preliminary tests demonstrated the effective possibility to enter the SBAs in medical practice in home-ventilo-therapy protocols by suitable interpretation of the monitored parameters from a physiological point of view. Thanks to a network composed by many SBA devices that send patients data to a remote server, the doctor can tele-monitor the status of patient in order to check any state of exacerbation of the disease and consequently improve quality of life in COPD.