Introduction
Many patients living with Stage III of COPD, especially those living in rural areas, those without regular transport, or those facing multi‑week waiting lists for pulmonology, resort to trial‑and‑error self‑medication to treat their disease; an older adult who guesses wrong can lose one or two critical days while bacteria seed mucus‑filled airways.
Traditional vital‑sign checks offer information too late after inflammation, and wearable devices on the market today remain inadequate for clinical decision-making. Commercial systems such as the Clario Cough Tracker and the Strados RESP patch record daily cough counts, yet reveal nothing about airway origin, posture, or temperature drift. Our senior project, the COPD Cough Communicator, by contrast, is a single‑use, seventy‑two‑hour adhesive patch that employs three catalogue‑grade sensor types: a miniature MEMS microphone, a three‑axis inertial‑motion unit, and a precision thermistor. These will help categorize a cough into “upper‑dry,” “lower‑productive,” or “mixed.” When productive‑cough frequency rises with temperature, the algorithm flags a likely infection.