Anagha Shah
Research

CoughScope

A handheld device that reads airflow and lung sound together, bringing COPD screening onto portable, low-cost hardware.

Diagnostic hardware, 2025 to 2026

Watch the videoCREST Gold certificate
Anagha blowing into the red CoughScope mouthpiece with its flow sensor attached
Testing the airflow path.
92.5%
best accuracy separating COPD from non-COPD cases
56
clinical participants in the evaluation
2
sensing paths: airflow and lung sound

The question

Can COPD screening leave the clinic and still capture useful evidence?

Conventional spirometry needs trained staff and dedicated equipment. CoughScope brings the core measurements into one portable prototype: forced airflow through a pressure sensor and respiratory sound through a microphone. Two signals describe the same breath better than either one alone.

The device

An ESP32 coordinates a pressure-based airflow sensor, a high-sensitivity microphone and an OLED display. It captures forced expiratory measurements while recording cough and lung-sound features for analysis.

ESP32, pressure sensor and OLED display used in the CoughScope prototype
The ESP32 sensing and display assembly.
Red 3D-printed enclosure with connected tubing
An early enclosure and airflow path.

The signal pipeline

Raw breath signals carry baseline drift, room noise and big differences between people. The chain cleans them up before any model sees them.

  1. Capture airflow and lung sound
  2. Remove baseline drift and noise
  3. Normalize amplitude
  4. Extract DFT and MFCC features
  5. Classify with lightweight models

MFCC extraction uses pre-emphasis filtering, windowing, an FFT, Mel-scale mapping and a discrete cosine transform. Those acoustic features are evaluated alongside spirometry measures such as FEV1, FVC and peak expiratory flow.

The result

I compared a support vector machine, K-nearest neighbors, a decision tree and a shallow neural network. The best reached 92.5% accuracy in separating COPD from non-COPD cases across data from 56 clinical participants.

Video

CoughScope prototype and project overview. Open on YouTube

Recognition and next steps

CoughScope received a Gold CREST Award from the British Science Association in June 2026. It was also an ExSTEMplar ASTRYC 2026 Phase 3 Finalist and was invited to the Phase 4 Final Showcase.

I presented the working guidebook to health teams at two NGOs. Both agreed to support on-site testing during their annual health check-up camps.