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How Louisville is combatting asthma through an app for inhalers | Ideas We Should Steal

With some 35,000 Philly students with asthma, it is the most common reason for chronic absenteeism here and around the country. For adults, asthma flare ups can mean missed work, expensive hospital visits, and other health problems.

Philadelphia, where some 22 percent of children suffer from asthma, is the third most challenging city to live in with the disease, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.
Philadelphia, where some 22 percent of children suffer from asthma, is the third most challenging city to live in with the disease, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.Read moreISTOCK

 Ideas We Should Steal is a regular feature of the Philadelphia Citizen, which will be holding an Ideas We Should Steal Festival in late 2018. 

Jefferson University pulmonary specialist Gregory Kane has some ideas: There might be lower subway fares during high-risk days, to cut down on traffic pollution; school district-wide calls to keep students with asthma inside; alerts to environmental authorities when local industry is releasing pollutants into the air. Even what Kane, chair of Jefferson's department of medicine, calls a "big hairy audacious goal": a city of the future where traffic is limited because of bad air quality, such as what happens already in Beijing.

>> READ MORE: Temporary bike grids: How Macon, Ga., won the bike lane culture war | Ideas We Should Steal

Jefferson's Kane, who envisions all sorts of policy changes that could come as a result of a similar project here, is clear on one thing: Philadelphia needs all the tools it can get to help asthma patients breathe better, more often. In particular, the city needs better and more support for patients in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, those who are poor and underrepresented in the medical field. Propeller's sensor would provide data, to help him better manage his patients' heath.

 Roxanne Patel Sheplavy is the executive editor of the Philadelphia CIitzen, where a version of this piece previously appeared.