The monitor has the potential to assist community health workers in establishing a more accurate measurement of a sick Childs breathing rate to help improve the diagnosis of pneumonia/FILE
The Children Automated Respiration Monitor to be released in the second quarter of 2016 is aimed to help improve the diagnosis and treatment of pneumonia in low resource countries that include Kenya.
The monitor has the potential to assist community health workers in establishing a more accurate measurement of a sick child’s breathing rate to help improve the diagnosis of pneumonia.
The monitor not only provides quantitative feedback, but also qualitative feedback to the healthcare provider based on the World Health Organization Integrated Management of Childhood Illness guidelines to diagnose fast breathing rates, which is one of the key vital signs to diagnosing pneumonia.
“Accurate diagnosis of breathing counts would support health workers in administering the antibiotics that children with pneumonia need potentially preventing many of the deaths caused by pneumonia each year,” Phillips East Africa General Manager Roelof Assies.
Assies added that each year, pneumonia kills more children that AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis combined and remains the leading infectious cause of death among children under five.
“Every 35 seconds a child dies of pneumonia with 99 percent of death occurring in low resource settings in developing countries,” he added.
The development of the Monitor was in collaboration between the Philips Africa Innovation Hub located in Nairobi, the Philip Research team in the Netherlands and India.
The monitors that only monitor children below five years have already been tested in different parts of the country and in India with improvements in design and technology incorporated on the basis of feedback from local health workers and clinical officers.
The Philips Children’s Automated Respiration Monitor converts chest movements detected by accelerometers into an accurate breathing count, using special development algorithms.
