Acoustic Assessment of Treatment Response for Children with Acute Asthma Exacerbation

Asthma is the most common pediatric chronic illness and acute asthma exacerbations in children lead to numerous emergency department (ED) visits each year. Current methods to gauge a child’s response to treatment rely on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative measures and require experienced practitioners. In this work, we present a child-friendly acoustic device developed with the aim of expediting and quantifying assessment of treatment responsiveness for this vulnerable population. The device acquires measurements from a digital stethoscope as sound is sent through the chest using a custom chest exciter. In this work, we compared sound transmission from patients before and after administration of hospital albuterol sulfate nebulizer. One hundred and forty recordings were collected from ten children that presented to the ED for acute asthma exacerbation. Preliminary data is presented for these patients, demonstrating a shift of approximately 2 dB after treatment and relief of symptoms. This improvement was also validated using an established asthma assessment scoring system.