Nairobi,  Kenya,  and Bangalore, India,  November 12 2015:On the occasion of World Pneumonia Day (worldpneumoniaday.org),  today, Philips has unveiled a Children’s Automated Respiration Monitor, aimed to help improve the diagnosis and treatment of pneumonia in low-resource countries, potentially preventing many of the 935,000 childhood deaths caused by pneumonia each year.
The product was developed jointly by Philips Innovation Centres in Bangalore India and  Nairobi, Kenya, with a  research team at Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Field testing on the Children’s Automated Respiration Monitor was conducted in East Africa and India and improvements in design and technology incorporated on the basis of feedback from local community health workers and clinical officers in these low-resource settings.
The Monitor converts chest movements detected by accelerometers into an accurate breathing count, using specially developed algorithms. The monitor not only provides quantitative feedback, but also qualitative feedback to the healthcare provider based on the World Health Organization’s IMCI(5) (Integrated Management of Childhood Illness) guidelines to diagnose fast breathing rates, which is one of the key vital signs to diagnosing pneumonia.
In many emerging markets, community health workers manually count through visual inspection, how many breaths a child takes in the span of one minute. But achieving an accurate count can be difficult, as shallow breaths are hard to detect, children often move around and there may be distractions and other checks to perform.
“The Philips Children’s Automated Respiration Monitor will be a game changer in diagnosing and treating pneumonia,” said Salim Sadruddin, Senior Child Health Advisor at NGO, Save the Children (savethechildren.org). “If we can remove the subjectivity associated with health workers counting breaths, we can improve the quality of treatment and help improve patient outcomes.”
 “As a leading health technology company, Philips’ vision is to improve people’s lives through meaningful innovation”, said JJ van Dongen, CEO Philips Africa. “Today, the population growth is highest in emerging markets like Africa and South East Asia, and innovation can help drive sustainable solutions that bridge the divide between the privileged and lesser privileged sections of society to improve the quality of life at all levels.”
 Field testing on the Children’s Automated Respiration Monitor was conducted in East Africa and India and improvements in design and technology incorporated on the basis of feedback from local community health workers and clinical officers in these low-resource settings.
The Philips Children’s Automated Respiration Monitor is pending CE-marking and is expected to become commercially available from the second quarter of 2016.