The AI-powered device monitors nocturnal respiratory symptoms, detecting early warning signs of asthma attacks in children up to five days in advance.
RT’s Three Key Takeaways:
- Early Warning Capability: The Albus Home device detects warning signs of asthma attacks, such as increased nocturnal cough and respiratory rate, up to five days before they occur, providing a window for early medical intervention.
- Clinical Validation: In a study involving 100 children, the device demonstrated clinical-grade accuracy, achieving 98.3% accuracy in respiratory rate measurement and 99% correlation in cough detection against gold standards.
- Impact on Asthma Management: The non-contact, AI-powered device offers continuous, real-world data collection during sleep, potentially improving asthma care, reducing emergency hospitalizations, and improving the efficiency of respiratory clinical trials.
Albus Health, the healthcare technology company specializing in monitoring nocturnal health parameters including cough and breathing patterns, announced results from a clinical study at the British Thoracic Society Winter Meeting 2024, revealing that Albus Home, the company’s AI-powered, innovative non-contact monitoring device with advanced algorithms, can detect warning signs of asthma attacks in children up to five days before they occur.
The study, conducted at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and Royal Brompton Hospital, demonstrated that the Albus Home device identified significant changes in children’s respiratory health days before they required emergency steroid treatment for asthma attacks. Researchers say this early warning window could provide time for medical intervention, potentially preventing emergency hospitalizations and improving patient outcomes.
“For the first time, we have technology that can reliably monitor children while they sleep, without any disruption to their normal routine,” says Prasad Nagakumar, MD, director for research at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and lead researcher on the study, in a release. “The device’s ability to detect changes up to five days before an attack represents a potential paradigm shift in asthma management, offering a window of opportunity for early intervention that simply hasn’t existed before.”
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The Childhood Home Asthma Monitoring Project study recruited 100 children with asthma. The researchers analyzed 47 asthma attacks across 28 children, finding that nocturnal cough frequency and respiratory rate began increasing five days before attacks occurred. In earlier studies, the device achieved clinical-grade accuracy, with 98.3% accuracy in respiratory rate measurement and 99% correlation in cough detection against gold standards.
Following insights from the study and feedback from participants and carers, Albus has developed a next-generation device that also measures heart rate, sleep parameters, and air quality metrics. The device’s sensors, along with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connectivity, unlock opportunities in remote patient monitoring.
Broader Applications for Clinical Trials and Patient Care
“This study validates our mission to revolutionize respiratory care through passive monitoring and early detection,” says Mikesh Udani, CEO of Albus Health, in a release. “Our technology has the potential to transform both patient care and clinical trials for several chronic diseases. By providing objective, continuous monitoring data, we can help pharmaceutical companies demonstrate response to treatment more efficiently while generating valuable insights for future drug development.”
While current clinical trials rely heavily on subjective symptom reporting and limited spot-checks of respiratory function, the Albus Home device provides continuous, real-world data throughout the night, when respiratory symptoms typically worsen. This has implications for respiratory drug development, where poor-quality data collection and unreliable symptom reporting often necessitate larger, longer, and more expensive clinical trials.
The Albus Home device offers pharmaceutical companies the ability to capture objective respiratory and sleep endpoints continuously, which can be used to bring new classes of therapies to asthma patients, monitor patient outcomes for post-approval studies, and expand indications and labels for existing drugs, according to a release from the company.
Albus Home has already been deployed commercially to collect real-world evidence on treatment response in a US-based phase IV trial by a pharmaceutical company. Albus is now focused on expanding its clinical evidence base and set of parameters monitored, while scaling its platform to address the growing global burden of respiratory disease.
Photo caption: Albus Home
Photo credit: Albus Health
