A New Telemedicine System for the Home Monitoring of Lung Function in Patients with Obstructive Respiratory Diseases

The conventional pulmonary function tests are based on spirometry, which unfortunately doesn´t produce accurate and reproducible results if performed without the supervision of specially trained staff. We recently showed that forced oscillation technique is best suited for the home-monitoring of respiratory patients. The aim of this study was to develop a real-time data processing algorithm for the automatic unsupervised assessment of the lung obstruction, a network architecture for the data transmission and a web-based application for the storage and management of the data. The results demonstrated a high reliability of the algorithm, the robustness of the data communication protocols and the effectiveness of the data management web portal. In conclusion, our system allows a reliable automatic home monitoring of lung obstruction and it may improve the efficacy and efficiency of the management of respiratory patients through an improved tailoring of the clinical treatments and an early detection of exacerbations.