ResApp Health Limited announced that it has received ethics approval from the Western Australian Aboriginal Health Ethics Committee for a pilot, double-blind study of its chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) screening smartphone application (app) in an Indigenous Australian population. The study will be carried out at the Geraldton Regional Aboriginal Medical Service in Western Australia and the principal investigator will be Dr Scott Claxton, Respiratory Physician at GenesisCare and a member of ResApp's scientific advisory board. COPD is a serious lung disease that mainly affects older people and is associated with and caused by smoking and/or environmental pollutants. Indigenous Australians die from COPD at a rate 10 times greater than non-Indigenous Australians and it is the most common type of respiratory disease for which Indigenous Australians are hospitalised. Diagnosis of COPD is based on a combination of self-reported symptoms and measurement of lung function by spirometry, which is unavailable in many remote communities. The study will recruit up to 200 subjects over a six-month period at the Geraldton Regional Aboriginal Medical Service. Each subject will undergo a full clinical and spirometric assessment, and results from ResApp's COPD screening app will be compared to the final clinical diagnosis. ResApp's COPD screening app analyses a patient's cough sounds to identify COPD. In a prior study, conducted at Joondalup Health Campus in Perth, Western Australia, the app was able to identify COPD in a broad general population with 86% positive agreement (sensitivity) and 85% negative agreement (specificity) when compared to a clinical diagnosis.