Data collection

The dataset used in this study consisted of 7001 records collected from asthma patients using previously prescribed home telemanagement.⁵² The severity of asthma varied from mild persistent to severe persistent.³¹ Patients used a laptop computer at home to fill in their asthma diary on a daily basis. The diary included information about respiratory symptoms, sleep disturbances due to asthma, limitation of physical activity, presence of cold, and medication usage (Table 1). The patients also measured peak expiratory flow (PEF) using a peak expiratory flow meter that communicated PEF values to the laptop automatically. The laptop sent the results of patient self-testing to a central server on a daily basis. Once the self-testing results were received, the patient’s current asthma status was automatically assigned to one of four levels of asthma severity on the basis of a widely accepted clinical algorithm promulgated by current clinical guidelines⁵³—green zone (zone 1): “doing well;” high yellow zone (zone 2): “asthma is getting worse;” low yellow zone (zone 3): “dangerous deterioration;” and red zone (zone 4): “medical alert.” For the purposes of this study, we merged zones 1 and 2 in one class named “no-alert” and merged zones 3 and 4 into another class named “high-alert.” For each day of patient self-testing, our research database included a set of variables from patient asthma diaries and corresponding asthma severity for this day expressed as “no-alert” zone or “high alert” zone.

Daily asthma diary