Remote monitoring of Paediatric Asthma to Improve Asthma Diagnosis and Control

Childhood asthma mortality remains substantial, and rates of hospitalisation are increasing globally in young children. This is driven by poor asthma control (which affects 50% of asthmatics) and ongoing exacerbations (which affects 25%). Of the 40,000 admissions each year, 80% are preventable! Current symptom-based management approaches fail – limited by poor perception/reporting by children and parents - and conventional spirometry/peak flow is insensitive or too challenging for this setting. In addition, the preschool age range is a critical period in asthma pathogenesis: symptoms emerge, airway structure changes, and a window for intervention exists before permanent lung function deficit is established by early school age. Preschool symptom-based diagnostic and/or predictive tools (for later asthma) perform poorly and ignore lung function due to spirometry’s limitations. Improved ability to differentiate early asthma phenotypes is a priority of international societies.

This research program consists of a series of projects to analyse existing, and collect new, data to define the clinical utility of a unique remote home-based monitoring strategy focused on the day-to-day variability of a novel and sensitive lung function test. Studies will investigate its ability to correctly identify evolving asthma, detect loss of asthma control and provide an early signal of an impending asthma exacerbation to improve long term asthma outcomes.

This research is led by Professor Paul Robinson.