Phone application that helps diagnose middle ear infections at home

Tram Ho

Its accuracy is equivalent to that of specialized medical devices.

Ear infections, or ear infections, are one of the first health problems your child faces at birth. By the age of three, most children had ear infections at least once. This infection often causes an accumulation of fluid in the ear, which is diagnosed by the doctors as purulent middle ear infection.

Although most cases of mild ear infections can go away on their own, if repeated relapses or chronic discharge may cause pain or even severe complications such as hearing loss.

Therefore, the detection and treatment of ear infections should be done quickly and thoroughly. At the clinic, doctors can use an eardrum to diagnose ear infections for children. The device offers 80-90% accuracy, but is quite cumbersome, expensive and requires medical licensing.

To overcome this inconvenience, a team of researchers at the University of Washington has developed a phone application that allows parents to detect their own ear infections. The application uses the smartphone’s speaker and microphone, plays sound inside the ear and retrieves the reflected wave similar to an eardrum at the clinic.

The researchers say their application is a cheap, easy-to-use solution for convenience, even with the same accuracy if not higher than a specialized medical device.

Research on this application has just been published in the Journal of Medical Sciences.

The application created by Washington University researchers is called EarHealth. It instructs you to fold a piece of paper and clamp it to the smartphone speaker section. After that, the app is turned on and will emit sounds to the middle ear canal and then bounce off.

On their way, reflected sound waves continue to interfere with waves emitted from the phone speaker. This interference pattern is then recorded by the microphone and then analyzed and calculated to detect the amount of fluid in the ear.

It’s like when you type on a glass of wine, ” said Paul Chan, a doctoral student at the University of Washington. “ Depending on whether the glass is empty or half filled, you’ll hear different sounds. Our application also works on the same principle. ”

EarHealth was tested by Chan and his team at Children’s Hospital Seattle, with the youngest children aged 18 months to 17 year olds. The results of the test were compared to the specialized ear measuring device, then turned back to fine-tune EarHealth’s accuracy.

Current screening tools are not easy to detect pus discharge from the middle ear. In fact, the only way you can be 100% sure is surgery, slitting into the eardrum and sucking out the pus , Chan said.

But in his preliminary study, the EarHealth application was able to detect pus in the middle ear with an 85% accuracy. After refining, its accuracy increased even more.

Chan tested EarHealth on 15 9-18 month old babies. In it, the application has detected 5 out of 5 children with pus middle ear infection, 9/10 children do not encounter this condition. Only 1 child did not discharge the middle ear but was misdiagnosed.

To check in real terms, Chan’s group instructed 25 parents to use the EarHealth app to test their ears. The results showed that they practiced very proficient operations, and the application also reached a high level of accuracy comparable to doctors.

This proves that parents have no trouble using applications outside the medical environment. And most importantly, the children in all of these trials responded very well when parents placed the phone with a paper funnel on their ears.

The sound that EarHealth emits is quite pleasant. Interestingly, when we turned them on and dropped into the ears of the children in the hospital, they responded with smiles. It turned out that the sound also had a calming effect , “Chan said.

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Talking about the potential of EarHealth, Chan said it would ideally become a home diagnostic tool to help parents detect ear infections early in their children. This will allow children to be more comfortable and do not need to go to the hospital when not needed.

In addition, in some underdeveloped countries and remote areas with no conditions to install modern medical equipment, EarHealth can also be used to help doctors diagnose better. This application gives the same level of accuracy as expensive expensive machines, and far beyond doctors who only diagnose with the naked eye.

Even in developing countries, smartphones are becoming a very popular tool. Therefore, if this application can provide physicians with accurate diagnostics equivalent to specialized machines, that can really change the way the middle ear management is done globally , ”Chan to speak.

He and his co-authors now set up a start-up company called Edus Health to commercialize their application. Chan shared that from now until the end of the year, he will apply to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve the EarHealth application as a medical device.

Edus Health is also working with doctors in many developing countries, hoping to spread its application globally, especially where it needs it most.

According to ZKnight, Young Intellectuals

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Source : cafebiz