ce magazine january 2019 issue

ScienceNews
Health, Technology, Science & Society
A new app tracks breathing to detect an
opioid overdose
Called Second Chance, the smartphone application could call for help in an emergency
By Maria Temming 2:00pm, January 9, 2019
A new smartphone app may help people who shoot up alone to 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 two possible signs of an
impending overdose: slow breathing or no
breathing at all.
Computer scientist Rajalakshmi Nandakumar and
colleagues at the University of Washington in
Seattle tested Second Chance at a legally
sanctioned injection facility in Vancouver, where
people self-inject illicit opioids, like heroin and
fentanyl, under medical supervision in an effort to
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