Childhood Pneumonia Screener: a concept

Abstract

Childhood pneumonia continues to be the number one cause of death in children under five years of age in developing countries. In addition to mortality, pneumonia constitutes an enormous economic and social burden because late diagnosis is associated with high cost of treatment and often leads to chronic health problems. There are several bottlenecks in developing countries in the case flow of a child with lung infection: 1) recognising the symptoms as a reason to seek care, 2) getting the patient to a first-tier health facility, 3) scarcity of trained healthcare personnel who can diagnose the condition and its severity, 4) access to a second-tier facility in severe cases. These factors are commonly present in rural areas but even in more urban settings, access to a physician is often delayed. The Childhood Pneumonia Screener project aims at bridging the diagnostic gap using emerging technology. Mobile "smart" phone communication with several inexpensive dedicated sensors is proposed as a rapid data-collection and transmission unit that is connected to a central location where trained personnel assisted by sophisticated signal processing algorithms, evaluate the data and determine if the child is likely to have pneumonia and what the level and urgency of care should be.

Keywords: acoustics; childhood mortality; global health; pneumonia; telemedicine.

Figure 1

Screenshot of proposed video image of a patient on the Childhood Pneumonia Screener field unit.

Figure 2

Diagram of the Childhood Pneumonia Screener field unit at three phases of data collection. Note that auscultation point 1 is over the trachea or manubrium, points 2 and 3 are on the anterior chest wall, points 4 and 5 are on the posterior bases and point H is on the left sternal border for heart sounds.

Figure 3

Flowchart of the data collection and analysis processes of the Childhood Pneumonia Screener.