Using iPhone App to Crowd-Source Asthma Research

In US alone, 11 people die from asthma, 40,000 miss work or school, 5000 visit the emergency room and 1000 are hospitalized everyday. (more asthma statistics here)

In the fight for managing asthma, researchers and patients now have a new tool in the form of an iPhone application, AsthmaMD.

Medical doctor and researcher Sam Pejham, UCSF Medical School Clinical Faculty and Director of Tri-Valley Pediatrics is the creator of the new iPhone app. The free application allows users to easily and quickly log their asthma activity, their medications, causes of their asthma in the form of a diary. Users may share the diary and a color graph chart of their asthma activities with their physicians to be included in their medical records.

Where AsthmaMD really make a difference is by gathering anonymous asthma data to help researchers with unprecedented information into the causes and external correlation of asthma. AsthmaMD users may optionally opt-in and allow the application to securely send encrypted and anonymous data, such as the severity of their asthma attacks, triggers, time, date and location to a database managed by Google. Thereby, giving researchers visibility to find correlation between higher asthma rates in one specific vicinity, time and date, pollutant and climate to name a few. The ability to gather this type of data, especially in real-time is unprecedented and Dr. Sam Pejham hopes it would have a great impact in advancing asthma research.

AsthmaMD is available as a free download for iPhone/iPod users. More information can be found at www.AsthmaMD.org