A researcher here who develops cutting-edge mobile and wearable health sensing tools is joining a new government-funded initiative to help patients with flu, Covid and other serious respiratory illnesses.
Cecilia Mascolo, Professor of Mobile Systems here, is one of the collaborators involved in the £10m Community Respiratory Infection Screening and Prognostics hub, known as CRISP.
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, CRISP will develop innovative technologies to help identify and monitor people with flu and other acute respiratory infections.
Patients may be given wearable sensors to monitor their breathing at home, take simple tests to track how their body is responding to an infection, or use a smartphone app to analyse their cough.
By combining information from these technologies with health records and AI models, researchers hope to better predict how an illness is likely to develop, helping patients and clinicians understand more about how to manage the illness.
"By linking researchers who are developing diagnostic software, hardware and modelling with GP surgeries, pharmacies and emergency departments, we can explore how these new tools might most effectively work with our healthcare systems." Prof Cecilia Mascolo
"By linking researchers who are developing diagnostic software, hardware and modelling with GP surgeries, pharmacies and emergency departments, we can explore how these new tools might most effectively work with our healthcare systems."
Prof Cecilia Mascolo
The goal of the CRISP hub, which is based at the University of Southampton, is to transform and understand the way such infections are assessed and managed in the community.
"This initiative, which will run for five years, could be transformative," says Prof Mascolo. "It will link researchers who are developing diagnostic software, hardware and modelling with GP surgeries, pharmacies and emergency departments. Together, we can explore how the new diagnostic tools and technologies we're developing might most effectively work with our healthcare systems."
Prof Mascolo will be contributing her expertise in developing mobile health sensing and AI modelling to this effort.
She co-founded a start-up, auryx, in 2025 with two of her former PhD students to turn everyday earbuds into health monitoring devices.
And during the pandemic, Prof Mascolo developed the Covid-19 Sounds app, a smartphone app that could analyse recordings of users coughing, breathing and speaking to detect whether or not they had Covid.
"So, we've developed initial technologies that could be brought forward here and integrated into this work," Prof Mascolo says. "And following the Covid-19 Sounds app, we worked on a subsequent project with the University of Southampton where we tried to track respiratory diseases together with GP practices."
Acute respiratory diseases, including flu, Covid-19, bronchitis, and chest infections, are the leading cause of acute illness worldwide. In England alone, they account for more than 850,000 hospital admissions each year.
While most infections are mild, the sheer number places significant pressure on patients, families and the NHS, particularly during winter. Uncertainty about whether an infection will resolve without treatment can also contribute to unnecessary healthcare visits and antibiotic use, increasing the risk of antimicrobial resistance.
As Dr Al Edwards, Associate Professor in Biomedical Technology at the University of Southampton, says, it’s vital to explore how technology can help address this issue.
"Advances in sensing, diagnostics and data science mean that it is now possible to assess and monitor acute respiratory illnesses over time in community settings, but key engineering questions remain about reliable measurement, and translation into recommendations for action."
