STTR Phase I: Remote assessment of respiratory function in hospital patients based on speech acoustics (COVID-19)

The broader impact of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is the development of new approaches for remote assessment of respiratory function during pandemics. Current pulmonary assessment methods require in-clinic visits and they induce coughing and droplet formation, thereby increasing the risk of disease spread. To reduce transmission risk these assessments have been limited to only those required for immediate treatment. The algorithms developed in this project will allow doctors to remotely monitor patients’ respiratory function via speech provided by patients using their own personal mobile devices. The broader impact is amplified when the developed algorithms are integrated into telemedicine platforms. The infrastructure and algorithms to be developed in this project will enable new remote monitoring paradigms that remove geographic and cost barriers and broaden participation in healthcare, with the potential to relieve the magnitude of health disparities for persons with respiratory conditions. This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will develop and demonstrate a novel approach for remote assessment of respiratory function. The critical technical innovation is the development of a panel of acoustic-based measures that index respiratory function and can be collected remotely from a patient’s personal mobile device without the need for additional hardware. For the purpose of the COVID-19 use case, a mobile application on the patient’s mobile device will guide the patient through a series of speech elicitation tasks, returning a context-specific assessment of respiration to the healthcare provider. The algorithms will be integrated within an existing API and be available to strategic partners. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.