Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News
A new smartphone app may help people who shoot up alone get medical treatment if they accidentally overdose.
The app, dubbed Second Chance, monitors its user for breathing problems that foreshadow an opioid overdose (SN: 3/31/18, p. 18). In an emergency, the app could call 911 or send an SOS to friends or family who could provide opioid-counteracting medication.
“Being able to track an overdose when a person may be by themselves could significantly improve the ability to save lives,” says psychiatrist Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., who was not involved in developing the app. More than 115 people die from an opioid overdose every day in the United States, according to the NIDA, and many victims are alone or with people who are either untrained or too impaired to help.
Second Chance, described online January 9 in Science Translational Medicine, converts a smartphone’s speaker and microphone into a sonar system that works within about a meter of a user’s body. When the app is running, the phone continuously emits sound waves at frequencies too high to hear, which bounce off a user’s chest. Tracking when these echoes reach the phone allows the app to detect…
The post A new app tracks breathing to detect an opioid overdose appeared first on FeedBox.