Lungsounds@UA Interface and Multimedia Database

Methodology

The GUI named LungSounds@UA was developed in the scope of a pilot study within the project “Adventitious lung sounds as indicators of severity and recovery of lung pathology and sputum location” (PTDC/SAU-BEB/101943/2008). The interface was informed by the literature and the need felt during the course of the project to collect and merge all relevant respiratory data in a single multimedia database. The application was developed in Matlab® (Mathworks, 2009) because of its rapid prototyping characteristics and to simplify the integration of implemented automatic detection algorithms, e.g., Dinis et al. (2012) and Oliveira et al. (2013).

This study followed the system development life cycle (SDLC), which is characterised by: i) planning, ii) analysis, iii) design, iv) implementation, and v) maintenance/support (Kushniruk, 2002); as well as the prototyping and iterative usability testing (Kushniruk & Patel, 2004).

The assessment of the developed application was performed in two ways: i) within a pilot study, conducted by two respiratory researchers in fifty-seven physiotherapy sessions of six patients with lower respiratory tract infection; and ii) in an evaluation session performed by four health professionals.