A project led by Dr Xiaorong Ding at the University of Oxford.

Asthma is the most common chronic disease among children. Physical activity has been shown to be beneficial in helping children cope with their asthma condition and improve life quality. However, studies have found that children with asthma  are usually less active then their healthy peers, in part due to parental or caregiver health beliefs about physical activity acting as a trigger of asthma rather than something helpful. This project aims to motivate children with asthma to be more active. We will use wearable technology to monitor the activity level and continuous heart rate in children with asthma. The wearable provides real-time feedback to children with asthma, e.g. step count and active minutes, and supplements this with personalised goals and rewards to recognise achievements, which has potential to increase their physical activity levels. In addition, the heart rate-based evaluation of activity enables an evidence-based activity tracking, which may help minimise safety concerns for caregivers, thus offering more support for children with asthma in engaging with physical activity. An intelligent algorithm will be further developed to generate a smart management plan on an individual basis with the aim of maximizing the outcome of asthma symptoms control and asthma attacks prevention.

This work and its findings are presented in a video by the Project Investigator here: