App trialled to manage patient asthma

A new asthma app is being trialled at Sheffield Children’s Hospital to help children manage their severe asthma.

A partnership between Sheffield Children’s and technology company Aseptika, the innovative trial uses the newly developed Asthma+me app to help patient and parents better manage severe asthma outside of the hospital. This allows the patient and/or the family to input information about their asthma and link up their inhalers.

The app collects this information and helps educate the child and the family, and can also help automatically warn them when an asthma attack is about to happen. With enough advanced warning, the hope is that families can act sooner and avoid visits to hospital.

Heather Elphick, paediatric respiratory consultant at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, said: “The app is an innovative way of extending our support at the hospital through technology to children and their families at home. The app can help families further understand when an asthma attack may happen, monitor their child’s asthma consistently through the App and perhaps prevent trips to hospital in the future. It’s a good way to complement the care received from us here at Sheffield Children’s and I’m looking forward to seeing where technology can take us next.”

Dr Sean Clarkson, Programme Manager at Yorkshire & Humber Academic Health Science Network (AHSN), said: “Asthma+me helps families to manage childhood asthma by increasing knowledge and enabling them to react quickly to anything that could exacerbate a child’s condition. This helps to reduce the number of unplanned hospital visits, including those to A&E. We believe Asthma+me has great potential to deliver significant benefits to children, parents/families and the health system and are pleased to be supporting Aseptika to build up their evidence base and adopt Asthma+me across the region.”