Digital Smart Inhaler Asthma Management in Children and Young People
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Smart digital inhaler enabled asthma management in high-risk children aged 5 to 16 years managed in primary care to prevent asthma attacks
IRAS ID
325172
Contact name
Erol Gaillard
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leicester
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 9 months, 27 days
Research summary
Importance: Asthma is the most common long-term disease in children and young people (CYP) in the UK. Uncontrolled asthma affects quality of life and frequently results in severe asthma attacks in CYP, more often than in other European countries.
Most asthma patients are treated by their GP. One of the most important problems is that the majority of children with asthma do not receive their preventer inhaler treatment regularly, called poor concordance. This often happens because families and CYP with asthma are poorly supported in managing their asthma at home.
Research question: We wish to find out whether digital devices which monitor medication usage, fitted to the child’s regular inhalers, can help children with poorly controlled asthma.
Medication use can be viewed on the family’s smartphone and shared with the child’s medical team. We will use this information to support families in their child’s asthma treatment remotely including reminders and education on asthma.
How: We will find children with poorly controlled asthma and recent asthma attacks on participating GP databases. We will invite these children for a GP asthma review. Clinical Research Practitioners (CRP) will conduct a standard high quality asthma review including some painless lung function tests to confirm the diagnosis of asthma which is important because many CYP are misdiagnosed. The research team will then fit a digital smart sensor to the child’s regular inhalers and monitor inhaler use remotely for 6 months and find out if the child’s asthma is better controlled.
We have involved families and children in the planning of the study from the outset and in the running of the study as we go along. We will ask families and children with asthma but also GPs and nurses whether they find the smart inhaler monitoring useful and how it can be improved.
REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/EM/0147
Date of REC Opinion
11 Jun 2023
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion