Ellington West

The toll of respiratory disease

Worldwide, more than half a billion people suffer from acute and chronic respiratory diseases. According to the World Health Organization, asthma is the most common noncommunicable disease of childhood. More than three million people die of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) each year. Someone loses their life to pneumonia every 39 seconds.

Making a quick and accurate diagnosis is one of the biggest challenges related to these diseases, especially in remote locations where access to technology such as X-ray machines may be limited and clinician shortages leave the population especially vulnerable.

This leads to poor health outcomes. Uncontrolled asthma and COPD mean more hospital visits and more deaths. Misdiagnosis of pneumonia and tuberculosis contribute to antimicrobial resistance, complicating treatment.

Bringing a breakthrough to the world

Ellington West is not a medical professional and never imagined being at the forefront of solving one of healthcare’s most pervasive problems. She began her career in market research consulting on brand strategies and later took a position at a national healthcare company.

She maintained a connection to the worlds of research and medicine through her father, James West, co-inventor of the foil electret microphone—now ubiquitous in microphone-containing devices—and an acoustics specialist. After retiring from Lucent Technologies, he joined the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and received a grant to address pneumonia-related infant mortality.

The innovation that resulted involved digitizing the sounds picked up by a stethoscope and training an algorithm to assist with a diagnosis on the spot—a potential game-changer in areas with few trained clinicians. As innovative as this approach was, however, it was destined to languish on the shelf unless a company could take it to market. Ellington didn’t want this to happen. “I thought, let me go back to my market research roots to see how viable this is,” she says. “Is there a market? Can we build a team?”

There was, and she did.

A marriage of acoustics and artificial intelligence

Ellington founded Sonavi Labs in 2017 to create advanced digital health assessment tools and commercialize the Johns Hopkins innovation. Feelix, the company’s first offering, is an AI-based stethoscope that captures and records high-fidelity lung sounds in any environment, then immediately analyzes them using an algorithm. This smart stethoscope can mimic the process of a trained physician, putting a powerful diagnostic tool in the hands of anyone who needs it.

“We’ve transformed the traditional stethoscope into a device that listens to the sounds of your body, identifies the abnormality, and then supports the healthcare provider in making a clinical decision,” Ellington says. Feelix received FDA approval in October of 2020.