Design and Development of Paper-based Spirometry Device and its Smart-phone based Lung Condition Monitoring and Analysis Software

Abstract

We describe the design, construction and characterisation of paper based devices to perform spirometry, a standard test for lung function assessment. In this device the instantaneous flowrate of the incoming breath from a person gets transformed to a specific acoustic frequency. In this manner, the time course of the persons breath profile is mapped to a time varying acoustic signal. The captured acoustic signal can be converted to standard spirometry curves and relevant parameters can be extracted as we describe in this paper. We compared our device with commercially available devices and showed that these paper based devices provide similar performance. These devices have advantage of low cost and simplicity of operation compared to currently available commercial products.