HIPAA Compliant Wireless Sensing Smartwatch Application for the Self-Management of Pediatric Asthma

Asthma is the most prevalent chronic disease among pediatrics, as it is the leading cause of student absenteeism and hospitalization for those under the age of 15. To address the significant need to manage this disease in children, the authors present a mobile health (mHealth) system that determines the risk of an asthma attack through physiological and environmental wireless sensors and representational state transfer application program interfaces (RESTful APIs). The data is sent from wireless sensors to a smartwatch application (app) via a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant cryptography framework, which then sends data to a cloud for real-time analytics. The asthma risk is then sent to the smartwatch and provided to the user via simple graphics for easy interpretation by children. After testing the safety and feasibility of the system in an adult with moderate asthma prior to testing in children, it was found that the analytics model is able to determine the overall asthma risk (high, medium, or low risk) with an accuracy of 80.10±14.13%. Furthermore, the features most important for assessing the risk of an asthma attack were multifaceted, highlighting the importance of continuously monitoring different wireless sensors and RESTful APIs. Future testing this asthma attack risk prediction system in pediatric asthma individuals may lead to an effective self-management asthma program.