eBreathie - smart inhaler

Our story began around 3 years ago when our co-founder Ana Rita Constante, then with 5-years of clinical experience, began noticing that asthma patients were present everyday in the emergency room. She found this peculiar, because although asthma is a frequent disease (it is the leading chronic respiratory disease in the world, accounting for about over 400,000 deaths/year and 70 billion euros/year in healthcare costs), it does have effective medication available (the inhalers) that should prevent asthma attacks from happening. So why was this our reality?
She began researching and found two main problems: the patients either forgot to take their medication or they didn't do it correctly.
Having this in mind, she decided that something needed to be done and participated in a programme delivered by NOVA University, where she met the other two co-founders - Ana Filipa and Ana Rita Rebelo - with a background in biomedical engineering and computer science. From that moment on, we combined our clinical and technical expertise to develop our product. However, some months later, when we were building our first MVP, we felt something missing - having someone on the team who had gone through the problems we were trying to solve, someone who had felt the limits imposed by this uncontrolled disease and who could experience first-hand the value eBreathie was proposing. And so we found Alexandre! He was also an alumni from FCT (like Rita and Filipa), who besides being a spectacular eletrotechnical engineer, is also a patient with asthma for the last 10 years. Our team imediately clicked and for the last year we have been working together towards a solution to this challenge, having developed our smart inhaler - eBreathie!

Our solution has 3 parts: the physical device, the mobile app and a patients’ management platform.
eBreathie tells asthma patients and their doctors two main things: WHEN the patients did their medication and HOW they did it (we create an inhalation profile each time the patient uses their inhaler, translating it into whether the inhalation was correct or not).
Our medical app allows the patients to monitor their disease and medication in real-time - they can access their inhaling profiles, register their symptoms, see information on air quality and air allergens and receive notifications of due or missed doses. We are also developing an AI algorithm - "Asthma Preview" - that will integrate the specific data of each patient, suggest them potential asthma triggers and predict when their disease is getting worse (even before they feel the symptoms).
Our clinical platform shows the same data but with a dashboard adapted to medical use, showing clinical outputs and metrics regarding therapeutic adherence and disease progression.
Finally, the mobile app and the doctors' platform will have a direct channel of communication, allowing telemedicine consults and eliminating healthcare access constraints.
https://youtu.be/IVgc6QVzh2g