Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Mon, 22/09/2025 - 12:22
Prof Cecilia Mascolo has just been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is one of 74 leading figures in the field of engineering and technology to be elected to the Academy Fellowship this year.
The new Fellows are drawn from every specialism from within the engineering and technology professions and cover sectors ranging from energy and defence to new materials.
"They have made exceptional contributions to their field," the Academy says, "pioneering new innovations within academia and business, providing expert advice to government, and fostering a wider comprehension of engineering and technology."
Cecilia is Professor of Mobile Systems here. She also co-directs the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence here, which focuses on next-generation mobile and wearable technology, as well as mobile applications.
In its citation, the Academy says that "Cecilia has contributed fundamental building blocks critical to the successful functioning and adoption of wearable and mobile devices, which have also influenced the scientific methods of other disciplines. Her work on mobile systems for audio diagnostics has led to substantial contributions in the context of respiratory health and on hearable computing for health and fitness."
Cecilia is a pioneer in devising frameworks to collect sensing data from devices such as phones and wearables with the purpose of developing models to understand behaviour and health. During the pandemic, she and her colleagues developed the COVID-19 Sounds App which collects and analyses short recordings of users coughing and breathing to detect if they are suffering from COVID-19.
Since then, she has been working on ways to turn the devices we wear – such as earbuds – into mobile monitors that can collect data about our state of health, and developing cutting edge machine learning tools to evaluate that data on the device itself.
In March this year, Cecilia and two former PhD students (Erika Bondareva and Kayla-Jade Butkow) set up auryx to take this work forward and use machine learning to turn regular existing earbuds into health and fitness sensors, tracking heart rate, HRV, respiration, and advanced cardiovascular parameters.
Many congratulations to Cecilia on her RAEng Fellowship.
