TUESDAY, Oct. 23, 2001 (HealthDayNews) -- That noise a doctor hears over a cell phone isn't necessarily a call breaking up. It could be a diagnosis in the making.
Scottish researchers say breathing into a cell phone may be a great diagnostic tool for figuring out if someone has asthma. For those who are not close to a hospital or a doctor, mobile phones may be the perfect solution to find out if you have breathing problems.
"What we are trying to do is somehow link up lung sound recordings with lung physiology," says study author Dr. Kenneth Anderson, a lung specialist at Crosshouse Hospital in Kilmarnock, Scotland. "I had the idea that maybe the microphone in a mobile phone would be good for breathing tests."
"If you go to a doctor with a wheeze, for instance, the doctor will give you a breathing test and use a stethoscope on your neck and chest to listen to your breathing," Anderson explains. "If you use a computer to analyze the sounds rather than your own ear, there are ways of using mathematics which will give you much more information than if you just listened. And even though your ear and brain are fantastic, now we've got computers that can analyze lung sounds and it just takes seconds. It used to take a day to analyze one breath sound."
To see if the device could be used to distinguish between people with asthma and those without it, Anderson and his colleagues used a mobile phone microphone and asked 20 patients, seven with diagnosed asthma, to apply the microphone to their necks and breathe five times.
They then recorded the breathing cycles using a free Internet voice-mail system and asked technicians, who were unaware of the health status of the patients, to use standard analysis techniques to see if they spot those with asthma. The breathing cycles were analyzed within five minutes of the transmission.
All the breathing cycles were clearly distinct and could be analyzed, Anderson reports. The mobile phone recordings were distinct enough to distinguish that three of the asthma patients had poorly controlled asthma. In addition, the microphone was sensitive enough to allow technicians to identify one patient who had an audible wheeze, and two patients whose asthma had been brought on by exercise.
"Using the mobile phone was very effective," Anderson says. "Now instead of a patient having to come to a doctor to have a lung examination, they can just use the phone. Our patients were 28 miles away, and all the tests were effective. I could have been in Louisiana or I could have been in Australia, and I would have gotten the same results."
The findings were published in the Oct. 20 issue of The Lancet.
It's not the first time that a telephone has been used to help doctors make a diagnosis, says Dr. Hans Pasterkamp, a pediatric respirology professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. "Phones have been used to do respirology, or lung function tests, to some good effect. And particularly in this part of the country, where we have a small population and a lot of area, telediagnosing has proven to be a very useful concept."
Pasterkamp says sound quality on mobile phones would, however, prevent a full diagnosis. "A telephone microphone has been developed for speech, and we have lung and breath sounds that register at much lower frequencies."
But, he says, "If the breathing problem is just something that can be heard through the neck, it could be very useful as an early diagnostic tool."
What To Do
If you'd like to hear what the mobile phone breathing cycles sound like, check out Glasgow University. And for more on asthma, visit the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.
