Asthma sufferers will use a portable monitoring device to record their breathing patterns 3 or 4 times a day from the comfort of their own home. The consultant can review the results compared to guidelines and then approve or recommend changes to the course of treatment. The trans-European Disease Management System has been designed for the diagnosis and monitoring of asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The system will not only record the date and time, temperature and humidity measures, critical to analysing the health of asthma patients, but also incorporates environmental conditions in the asthma sufferer's environs. These include measurements of air pollution and quality, which assist in providing the correct treatment and diagnosis for individual patients.
Patients can record their symptoms and use of medication as well as recording their lung function.
The central collection and analysis of data will also be invaluable in providing a broader picture of asthma trends across different countries. The consortium is funded under the European Commission TEN-Telecom programme. All rights reserved.