Albus Health Device Detects Early Warning Signs of Child Asthma Attacks

Albus Health, the healthcare technology company pioneering monitoring of nocturnal health parameters including cough and breathing patterns, released the results from a clinical study on the company’s AI-powered, innovative non-contact monitoring device to detect child asthma attacks. 

Results were presented at the British Thoracic Society Winter Meeting 2024. Albus Home’s device includes advanced algorithms that can detect warning signs of asthma attacks in children up to five days before they occur.

“For the first time, we have technology that can reliably monitor children while they sleep, without any disruption to their normal routine,” said Dr. Prasad Nagakumar, Director for Research at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and lead researcher on the study. “The device’s ability to detect changes up to five days before an attack represents a potential paradigm shift in asthma management, offering a window of opportunity for early intervention that simply hasn’t existed before.”

The study was conducted at Birmingham Children’s Hospital and Royal Brompton Hospital. It demonstrated that the Albus Home device successfully identified significant changes in children’s respiratory health days before they required emergency steroid treatment for asthma attacks. 

The Childhood Home Asthma Monitoring Project (CHAMP) study recruited 100 children with asthma. The researchers analyzed 47 asthma attacks across 28 children, finding that nocturnal cough frequency and respiratory rate began increasing five days before attacks occurred. In earlier studies, the device achieved clinical-grade accuracy, with 98.3% accuracy in respiratory rate measurement and 99% correlation in cough detection against gold standards.

“This study validates our mission to revolutionize respiratory care through passive monitoring and early detection,” said Mikesh Udani, CEO of Albus Health. “Our technology has the potential to transform both patient care and clinical trials for several chronic diseases. By providing objective, continuous monitoring data, we can help pharmaceutical companies demonstrate response to treatment more efficiently while generating valuable insights for future drug development.”

Albus Home’s device provides continuous, real-world data throughout the night. It measures heart rate, sleep parameters, and air quality metrics. The device has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connectivity.

The Albus Home device offers pharmaceutical companies the ability to capture objective respiratory and sleep endpoints continuously, which can be used to bring new classes of therapies to asthma patients, monitor patient outcomes for post-approval studies, and expand indications and labels for existing drugs.