P159 Validation of the VitaloJAK™ 24 Hour Ambulatory Cough Monitor

Introduction Development of novel treatments for cough and itsmanagement are hampered by the lack of well validated objectivecough frequency methodologies. Previous validations have been performed over limited time periods or in laboratory conditions notalways representative of typical usage. We describe the rigorous validation of a semi-automated 24 hour ambulatory cough monitoringsystem (Vitalojak; Vitalograph; Buckinghamshire, England)operating in a manner which completely replicates routine practise.Methods In total 10 (4 female) patients (mean age 60.4 years [SD±14.1] including 6 chronic cough, 2 asthma, 1 COPD and 1 healthycontrol underwent full 24 Hour ambulatory monitoring (VitaloJAK™). These recordings were manually counted by trained coughcounters who also recorded the time at which each cough occurred.These 24 hour recordings were then compressed using customdesigned compression software and the sensitivity to cough and thereduced file times were determined. Importantly in each case weconfirmed that cough sounds identified in the compressed files werethe same sounds identified by the trained manual cough counters inthe full 24 hour recording. We tested the software algorithm usingthree distinct compression levels (1, 2 and 3).Results All results are presented as median (IQR).Sensitivities to cough (%) for compression levels 1, 2 and 3 are100(100, 100), 100(99.53, 100) and 99.92(99.33, 100) and for reducedfile times (minutes) 65.89 (62.40, 83.07), 43.21 (35.94, 57.23) and26.30 (25.07,46.81) respectively (Table 1).Conclusions The vitaloJAK™ is a reliable, robust and efficient toolfor the objective measurement of cough frequency. Importantly itreduces 24 hour recordings by up to 98% whilst preserving close to100% of recorded cough sounds. This development facilitates efficient and speedy manual cough counting and the level of compression achieved represents significant progress towards fully automated cough monitoring.