Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations – episodes of worsening symptoms – are a leading cause of:
Hospital admissions
Premature death
Winter pressures on the NHS
The care currently provided to someone experiencing an exacerbation is reactive. This means treatment typically begins only after symptoms have become a lot worse.
Although we know about some risk factors associated with exacerbations, we don’t currently have a reliable method of predicting when a person is likely to become unwell.
This limits opportunities for early intervention and prevents us from truly moving towards personalised, preventative care.
Project aims
The FORESEE (Forecasting Exacerbations in COPD) project will develop and test a prototype digital health platform designed to monitor patients continuously in their everyday environments.
We will:
Build and pilot a prototype digital monitoring system
Assess the usability and acceptability of our platform among people living with COPD
Collect data to explore what changes before an exacerbation
Establish the feasibility of linking wearable and environmental data
What we hope to achieve
We hope that our work will lay the foundations for a scalable system that integrates wearable and environmental monitoring into respiratory care—an area of high unmet clinical need.
Longer-term, the FORESEE platform aims to enable more personalised care by identifying individuals at risk earlier, supporting preventative treatment strategies, and improving quality of life.