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GoBreath makes fixing your lung capacity fun

The digital spirometer could be used to rehabilitate people with lung issues.

If you have issues with breathing after chest trauma, surgery or anesthesia, then there are breathing exercises designed to help. Normally, your ability to breathe is calculated by using a spirometer, which isn't that interactive -- or accurate. That's what prompted a team of Korean designers to begin working on GoBreath, a digital spirometer that tries to make breathing exercises fun. It's another one of Samsung's C-Lab projects to try and spin out neat product ideas from the Korean behemoth.

The small white device connects to a smartphone over Bluetooth, and then you breathe into it in the normal way. But on screen, rather than a dull metric of how well you're doing or a figure of your peak flow, the data are represented visually. For respiration, you need to follow a dot running along a graph, Flappy Bird-style, while coughing requires you to cough loud enough to shake the leaves from a cartoon tree.

Right now, it's just a demonstration, and the team doesn't — yet — have a clear road to turning this device into a product. But you never know, in a couple of years, we may see Samsung-branded digital spirometers in use to help folks with damaged lungs get back on their feet.

Nicole Lee contributed to this report.

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