If you are wondering how in the world asthma has anything to do with GPS technology, you’re not alone. As strange as it sounds, David Van Sickle of the University of Wisconsin has combined GPS technology with an asthma inhaler in the hopes of better understanding asthma and what triggers it.
Van Sickle is a scholar in U of W’s Department of Population Health Sciences and his goal is to discover the danger zones that could be life-threatening to asthma sufferers. The project is in its infancy, but he hopes that some day his work will help researchers find out exactly why individuals get asthma.
The asthma inhaler will have a GPS unit built into it. Each time the person uses the inhaler, the location will be tagged by the GPS unit. The researchers will keep a record of where the asthma attacks take place and will designate these locations as potential danger zones. This data will be collected for a large group of participants and hopefully patterns will emerge.
The end-goal is to save lives and perhaps even assist scientists in discovering why people have asthma at all.
