Asthma+me SMART: Development of an AI-supported clinical decision support system for children with moderate-to-severe asthma treated in specialist paediatric clinics.

"Asthma affects 1.1 million UK children costing more than £58m per annum. Aseptika's cloud-based technology supporting disease management (www.activ8rlives.com) is ready to be developed as a clinical healthcare management device. Our previous SBRI/Innovate UK projects shows that paediatric asthma patients, once referred to the specialist clinic, tend to remain within the clinic re-call system. Very large numbers of paediatric patients are therefore attending specialist clinics for short duration recall visits. Using our Asthma+me SMART system with our proprietary connected devices and artificial intelligence integrated system, we can support earlier discharge from the clinic while providing patient-centred management of asthma. The system, remotely linked to the specialist clinic and employing AI-based disease status monitoring and decision support, will significantly impact clinical care within the NHS.

We will develop an Artificial Intelligence-based asthma monitoring system that will be embedded into our Asthma+me SMART phone App. The system will monitor patient asthma status and through monitoring the data being collected each day, will be able to identify when there is a risk of moving from well to less-well controlled situations and alert to asthma attacks. The App will provide a range of automated support to the patient and also send clinical disease status reports to the clinician identifying data of clinical interest for patient risk stratification.

To achieve our objectives we will design, build and validate our AI system by collecting asthma patient data from the Sheffield Childrens' Hospital clinic. These data will be used to train our system to recognise patterns of well and poorly controlled asthma. The outcome of this project will be the Asthma+me SMART that will be ready for regulatory approvals.

The Asthma+me SMART solution will be a highly innovative and interactive system that will allow enhanced disease management by the patient, family and clinician, increased remote self-management of asthma while providing comfort that the asthma clinic is aware of the patient disease status.

Our Asthma+me SMART system will positively impact the NHS specialist clinic work flows by automating repetitive tasks, encouraging parents to undertake more of the workload, decrease the numbers of follow-up appointments, reduce unscheduled hospital admissions and A&E attendance.

For children with moderate-to-severe asthma, this will reduce referral times. For the NHS, this will reduce service utilisation and costs.

Social benefits are: reduction in lost school days for affected children, fewer days taken off from work by parents and associated travel costs of attending clinics."