Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed GaitTrack, an app that will turn your smartphone into a health monitor with a direct line to your doctor.

The new app works by analyzing the way you walk. Taking it a step beyond pedometers, GaitTrack uses eight motion parameters to perform a detailed analysis of a person's walking pattern. This data can then be used to detect cardiopulmonary, muscular and neurological issues.

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Doctors have long considered a person's gait as the "sixth vital sign", after blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate and blood oxygen levels. Gait speed involves several important systems in the body working together, so changes in gait can signify a problem in one or more of the systems.

Frequently, doctor's order a six minute walk test for patients with heart and lung disease, such as congestive heart failure, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), common in smokers.

Because the gait of patients with chronic cardiopulmonary diseases can't be measured with conventional pedometers due to their shorter, shuffling strides, specialized medical accelerometers are commonly used.

The GaitTrack app is a first attempt to bring the same technology to the patients' own smartphones. 

Extensive tests with the app using the common six-minute walk revealed that not only would the GaitTrack app be cheaper than a medical accelerometer, but also possibly more accurate.

The analysis discovered that the data collected from the app could also predict lung function with 90% accuracy, matching the pulmonary function test known as FEV1.

The underlying idea behind GaitTrack is that it would be running constantly in the background as the patient carries his or her phone around, collecting data, analysing it and alerting the patient's doctor if need be.

Bigger trials of GaitTrack are currently underway, and Bruce Schatz, head of Medical Information Science at the University, is hopeful that the app will be available for download within a few months.

TagsGaitTrack, University of Illinois, Heart-Lung Disease, Cardiopulmonary, App, asthma, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, gait, walking, medicine