Incorporating remote patient monitoring (RPM) and artificial intelligence (AI) offers promising solutions to the challenges posed by chronic respiratory conditions like COPD, asthma, and chronic cough. By continuously and unobtrusively tracking symptoms, RPM can detect exacerbations early, reducing healthcare costs and improving patients’ quality of life. Acoustic AI, which recognizes sounds like coughs, enhances diagnostic capabilities. Patients, from those with simple coughs to those with chronic diseases, stand to benefit greatly from objective cough monitoring, leading to better understanding, improved care, and fewer costly exacerbations. RPM’s future in respiratory health promises widespread adoption and enhanced patient empowerment.
The realm of healthcare is on the brink of a transformative era, poised to alleviate the burdens of chronic respiratory illnesses, including COPD, asthma, and chronic cough, through the integration of cutting-edge remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
The collective impact of respiratory ailments, encompassing COPD, asthma, chronic cough, and pneumonia, reverberates across individuals and healthcare systems, exerting a staggering toll. With COPD alone affecting over 15 million people and straining the healthcare budget by nearly $50 billion annually, the urgency for innovative solutions is evident.
While daily maintenance therapies enable many sufferers to lead productive lives, exacerbations loom ominously and, if left unchecked, can prove fatal. Even non-fatal episodes lead to increased emergency room visits and extended hospital stays, incurring both financial and quality-of-life costs. For instance, COPD alone results in more than two million ER and hospital admissions each year.
Health IT experts posit that remote patient monitoring, coupled with artificial intelligence, holds the potential to ameliorate these issues. By harnessing RPM and AI technologies, healthcare can mitigate costs and enhance the well-being of patients. To delve deeper into these prospects, we had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Peter Small, Chief Medical Officer at Hyfe AI, a leading provider of AI algorithms integrated into remote patient monitoring technologies, including cough tracking.
Q. What challenges in respiratory healthcare could be addressed through remote patient monitoring?
A. The early detection of exacerbations poses a formidable challenge due to the unpredictable nature of their symptoms. Take cough, for instance—a multifaceted symptom of many respiratory diseases that fluctuate in severity from day to day. Moreover, patients often struggle to recognize deteriorating symptoms until they reach a critical stage, necessitating emergency care.
Remote patient monitoring’s greatest advantage lies in its ability to passively, continuously, and unobtrusively track these symptoms, thereby empowering patients to manage their conditions more effectively. For instance, studies have demonstrated that monitoring cough can detect COPD exacerbations over three days before patients seek care, enabling early intervention and prevention of these episodes.
Q. Can you explain what acoustic AI is and how it can be applied in remote patient monitoring?
A. While large language models like ChatGPT have recently garnered attention, the use of deep learning models in healthcare is not new. These models, voracious consumers of data, initially found their application in image-based fields like dermatology, ophthalmology, and radiology.
The latest frontier in AI healthcare is acoustic AI, which extends these computer methods to the realm of sound. When trained on extensive and diverse datasets of annotated sounds, these techniques can recognize and classify sounds like heart murmurs, wheezing, or coughing.
When integrated into digital stethoscopes, they enhance clinicians’ diagnostic capabilities and aid in medical decision-making by tracking sound frequencies. Eventually, when incorporated into consumer products, acoustic AI will empower patients to comprehend their chronic conditions better and better cope with them.
Q. What are the expected outcomes for patients with RPM, from simple coughs to chronic conditions like asthma or COPD?
A. Coughing is one of the most common reasons for seeking medical care, accounting for nearly one in five healthcare visits. Paradoxically, in the era of precision health, cough remains inadequately measured, complicating both its diagnosis and treatment.
Most coughing stems from self-limited ailments like upper respiratory infections, but in many cases, it persists for months or years, causing significant distress. Chronic cough, especially since the advent of COVID-19, has led to social stigmatization, inhibiting individuals from participating in public activities.
Chronic cough has been linked to various issues such as urinary incontinence, broken ribs, social isolation, and depression. Thankfully, recent scientific advances have illuminated the nature of chronic cough, revealing it as a disease of neural hypersensitivity, distinct from common conditions like reflux, asthma, or post-nasal drip.
This understanding has spurred a pharmaceutical race to develop effective treatments, with a new cough drug likely to receive FDA approval by year-end—the first in over six decades. Objective, unintrusive cough monitoring will revolutionize care for chronic cough patients, enhancing their understanding of the condition, facilitating diagnosis and treatment, and averting costly and dangerous exacerbations.
Q. What does the future hold for RPM in respiratory health, and what developments do you foresee in this field?
A. We are currently in the midst of a healthcare revolution that empowers patients to monitor their health using devices like home spirometers and sphygmomanometers. Continuous monitoring of vital signals, such as blood glucose, is rapidly becoming the gold standard in healthcare.
As someone who has lived with a chronic cough for over three decades, I am particularly excited about how continuous cough monitoring can empower patients to have more informed dialogues with their doctors and regain control over their health.
Furthermore, as a tuberculosis expert, I anticipate that improved cough monitoring will enhance the care for numerous serious medical conditions. I predict that, within a few years, FDA-cleared cough monitoring devices will be commercially available and routinely used by those with cough-related conditions.
Subsequently, cough monitoring will become as commonplace as step counters on consumer devices, garnering attention only from those who require it. I look forward to the day when counting coughs is as simple as counting steps and as vital as continuous glucose monitoring, redefining the landscape of respiratory healthcare.
