GPS- and WiFi-Enabled Asthma Inhaler Sends Epidemiology Data As It Helps You Breathe
If your asthma is acting up, you're probably not the only one. But unless you're standing next to someone who is also huffing his or her inhaler, you wouldn't know it. That's a problem for epidemiologists who do their best work when they're buried in data, and it's exactly the problem a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) researcher aims to solve with a GPS- and WiFi-enabled inhaler. Asthma attacks can happen anywhere, but the causes of these attacks can be hard to pin down because patients don't always report, or even remember, every time they pop their inhaler out for some respiratory relief. Dr. David Van Sickle's Spiroscout inhaler aims to change this. Suck on the Spiroscout and it logs the time and position, sending it to a central computer for analysis. Related ArticlesGene-Silencing Inhaler Shows First Success Preventing Human DiseaseInhalable Measles Vaccine Set to Debut in First Human...