THE FUTURE IS (almost) NOW! A smartphone app that can detect opioid overdose and its precursors

Researchers have developed a cellphone app that uses sonar to monitor someone's breathing rate and sense when an opioid overdose has occurred.

Tragically, there were 2,066 apparent opioid-related deaths in Canada between January and June 2018; 94% were accidental. During an overdose, a person breathes slower or stops breathing altogether. These symptoms are reversible with the drug naloxone if caught in time. But people who use opioids by themselves have no way of asking for help in the event of an overdose.

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a cellphone app, called Second Chance, that uses sonar to monitor someone's breathing rate and sense when an opioid overdose has occurred. The app accurately detects overdose-related symptoms about 90 percent of the time and can track someone's breathing from up to 3 feet away.

"The idea is that people can use the app during opioid use so that if they overdose, the phone can potentially connect them to a friend or emergency services to provide naloxone," said author Shyam Gollakota.

How?

The Second Chance app sends inaudible sound waves from the phone to people's chests and then monitors the way the sound waves return to the phone to look for specific breathing patterns. In addition to watching breathing, Second Chance also monitors how people move.

"People aren't always perfectly still while they're injecting drugs, so we want to still be able to track their breathing as they're moving around," said lead author Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, a doctoral student in the Allen School. "We can also look for characteristic motions during opioid overdose, like if someone's head slumps or nods off."

To be able to use real-world data to design and test the algorithm behind the app, the researchers partnered with the Insite supervised injection facility in Vancouver, Canada. Insite is the first legal supervised consumption site in North America. As part of the study, participants at Insite wore monitors on their chests that also track breathing rates.

The researchers also wanted to make sure the algorithm could detect actual overdose events, because these occur infrequently at Insite. The researchers worked with anesthesiology teams at UW Medical Center to "simulate" overdoses in an operating room, allowing the app to monitor people and detect when they stop breathing.

What now?

While the app is not available to the public yet, it is patented and the researchers currently “plan to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration.”

Sources:

Press release: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r.../01/190109142715.htm

Scientific article: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/474/eaau8914