Improving asthma control assessment and outcomes in children with asthma using an AI-digital tool: a prospective multi-centre cohort study

BACKGROUND Achieving good asthma control is a goal of asthma management. In children, asthma control and quality-of-life assessments include determining the presence of wheeze. However, wheeze is unreliably reported with high disagreement (>50%) between parental and physician detection of wheeze. Objectively defining wheeze using WheezeScan™ (a user-friendly, artificial intelligence-based device) could improve assessment of asthma control and hence management. OBJECTIVE Our primary aim is to determine whether adding WheezeScan™ to routine clinical care improves parental asthma control assessment (ACA) in children (aged 4–11 years). Our secondary aims are to examine the impact of WheezeScan™ upon patient-reported outcomes (PROs), the parent asthma management self-efficacy scale (PAMS), healthcare costs and ease of WheezeScan™ use. The primary hypothesis is that using WheezeScan™ alters ACA group. METHODS Our multicentre prospective cohort study involves 125 children with specialist-confirmed asthma. Over 5-weeks, parents/caregivers use the WheezeScan™ twice-daily at home and whenever wheezing is suspected. After the first week of using the WheezeScan™, asthma medications may be adjusted based upon the child's asthma control score and WheezeScan™ data. Study outcomes are collected at baseline, week-1 and week-5. Our primary endpoint is the proportion of children whose assessment of asthma control changed between week-1 and baseline, based upon parental assessments using WheezeScan™ data. Secondary outcomes are PROs (asthma-related quality-of-life), PAMS, healthcare costs and WheezeScan™ ease of use. CONCLUSIONS This protocol describes our study to determine if using digital technology to accurately identify wheeze in children with asthma improves their asthma assessment, asthma-related PROs, including PAMS, and healthcare costs.