The paper is derived from the Digital Health Lab’s Lung Health project, where the team is developing innovative technologies to help patients with chronic respiratory diseases such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) or Asthma. The paper particularly focuses on algorithms that allow users to evaluate their lung function on their own without clinical supervision, simply by recording breathing sounds on their smartphones.

“Winning the Best Paper Award at such a competitive venue as the IEEE PerCom testifies to the recognition of our research from leading experts in pervasive computing. I feel fortunate to work in a lung health project that has potential to have an impact on respiratory patients, to support the control over their illness and improve the quality of life,” said Mahbubur Rahman, the first author of the paper who is working as Research Engineer in Digital Health Lab.

Acknowledging the Best Paper Award, PerCom 2020 General Chair and the University of Texas at Austin Professor Christine Julien shared an encouraging note emphasizing the potential impact of the Digital Health Lab’s work on real-world patients. She commented, “Having much more accessible tools for treating this [respiratory] disease would be so incredible. I love that there is this real-world impact of what you’re working on.”

The Digital Health Lab at SRA is partnering with world-leading physicians and advanced health research institutions to develop novel algorithms to make the health monitoring tools accessible anywhere, anytime through smartphones and smartwatches. The Digital Health Lab’s papers have also previously received the Best Poster Award at the IEEE Body Sensor Network (BSN) 2019 conference.