An artificially intelligent app for asthma management

South Australia has one of the highest rates of asthma in the world. Even more concerning is that more South Australian children end up in hospital due to asthma than in any other part of Australia.

Associate Professor Carson-Chahhoud of the Women’s and Children’s Health Network and her team were awarded 2023 WCH Foundation Bloom Research Program funding for the project titled ‘Clinical trial to evaluate a digital self-management and mental health intervention for young people with asthma and their families’. She and her team hope to improve children’s self-management of asthma using an artificial intelligence-based mobile app.

Over the past nine years, Associate Professor Carson-Chahhoud and a team of clinicians, researchers, policy makers, asthmatics, their carers and key community stakeholders have partnered to co-design prototypes for asthma self-management apps. They have demonstrated the acceptability of their prototypes, and now WCH Foundation Bloom Research Program funding will allow them to develop these prototypes into a single app and test its effect on asthma symptoms. How well this app works will be determined through a rigorous randomised controlled trial involving asthma patients under the care of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, and the wider South Australian community.

Ultimately, if found to be effective, this project has the potential to reduce hospitalisations and health care expenditure and improve the lives of children living with asthma, and their families.

Dr Shagufta Perveen, Dr Rebecca Perry, Associate Professor Kristin Carson-Chahhoud, the Honourable Chris Picton MP, Dr Andrew Tai and Michael Luchich at the 2023 Bloom Research Program awards night.

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