title: A low-cost mobile adaptive tracking system for chronic pulmonary patients in home environment.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The main objective of this study is presenting a real-time mobile adaptive tracking system for patients diagnosed with diseases such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and application results at home. The main role of the system is to support and track chronic pulmonary patients in real time who are comfortable in their home environment. It is not intended to replace the doctor, regular treatment, and diagnosis.
  
  
  METHODS
  In this study, the Java 2 micro edition-based system is integrated with portable spirometry, smartphone, extensible markup language-based Web services, Web server, and Web pages for visualizing pulmonary function test results. The Bluetooth(®) (Bluetooth SIG, Kirkland, WA) virtual serial port protocol is used to obtain the test results from spirometry. General packet radio service, wireless local area network, or third-generation-based wireless networks are used to send the test results from a smartphone to the remote database. The system provides real-time classification of test results with the back propagation artificial neural network algorithm on a mobile smartphone. It also provides the generation of appropriate short message service-based notification and sending of all data to the Web server. In this study, the test results of 486 patients, obtained from Atatürk Chest Diseases and Thoracic Surgery Training and Research Hospital in Ankara, Turkey, are used as the training and test set in the algorithm.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The algorithm has 98.7% accuracy, 97.83% specificity, 97.63% sensitivity, and 0.946 correlation values. The results show that the system is cheap (900 Euros) and reliable.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The developed real-time system provides improvement in classification accuracy and facilitates tracking of chronic pulmonary patients.
authors.affiliation: Electronics and Computer Education Department, Faculty of Technology, Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey.
authors.forename: Ali Hakan
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Işik
authors.forename: Inan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Güler
authors.forename: Melahat Uzel
authors.initials: MU
authors.lastname: Sener
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000465:Algorithms; D001249:Asthma; D040421:Cell Phone; D005260:Female; D006699:Home Care Services; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D029424:Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive; D012129:Respiratory Function Tests / Q000379:methods; D017678:Sex Distribution; D017216:Telemedicine / Q000191:economics* / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D013686:Telemetry / Q000191:economics* / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D014421:Turkey