UCLA

COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) is a serious lung disease which makes people hard to breathe. The number of people who have COPD is on the rise. COPD patients require lung function examinations and perform breathing exercises on a regular basis in order to be more aware of their lung functions, get diagnosed early, and control the shortness of their breaths. In order to help people with COPD, we developed mCOPD which is a smartphone based Android application made especially for COPD patients. COPD patients can do breathing test on mCOPD. mCOPD will automatically record test results and send data to doctors via the phone, assisting them in making diagnostic decisions. A novel game based breathing exercise system is also offered by mCOPD. We evaluated mCOPD in controlled and uncontrolled environments with 40 subjects. Deviation between the test results of using mCOPD and using a digital spirometer is about 10%. The experimental results show that this mCOPD system is a promising application for remote medical treatment of COPD.