News

We are pleased to announce we are offering all Airwave participants the opportunity to take part in the online follow-up survey at-home. This will include an online follow-up questionnaire, as well as a cognitive test, hearing test and a food diary which you can view feedback for if you choose to. We will email the invitations to participants over the next quarter. If you do not receive an email and believe you are eligible to take part, please contact us at airwave@imperial.ac.uk.

Further information and FAQs can be found here.

Friday, May 15, 2026

For the researcher community, we have written a short explanation of the issues you may wish to consider when deciding which TRE to apply to.

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

We've written a short document addressing certain specialist topics that may be of interest to researchers wanting to use the Airwave resource. For example:

• Inviting participants to join your research study
• Providing feedback to participants engaging in your research
• Communicating the relevance of your research to participants as a whole
• Publications & acknowledgements
• Treatment of Intellectual Property Rights
• Safe Outputs
• Data Sharing

This is a short document providing guidance on certain specialist topics for researchers wishing to access the Airwave resource.

• annex-a-guidance-for-applicants

Friday, December 5, 2025

The 2025 newsletter is now online here and everyone who has not opted out of newsletter notifications will receive an email from us in the final weeks of December. If we don't have an email address for you, and your postal address is up to date, expect to receive a letter in January.

To save on our postage costs and to do our bit for the environment, it's better communicate by email rather than by post. If the address we have for you is likely to be out of date, please write to us at airwave@imperial.ac.uk.

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

As part of our ongoing commitment to follow-up the cohort members susceptibility to developing cancer in later life, and specifically in relation to its use of the Airwave handset, we have published a new research paper updating our 2018 analysis. For a general audience, you may find our commentary on the 2018 paper useful. For the specialist, the ancillary publications describing the details of our analysis methods may be relevant.

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

We are delighted to report that the Airwave Study is part of the the new era of health and well-being research as part of the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration. This initiative will allow our data to be safely reused for bona fide health research projects in conjunction with similar cohorts, ensuring the best use is made of the investment made into the cohort.

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

For the research community, we are pleased to publish release two of the Data Dictionary overview document. This is a technical overview for researchers of research datasets, providing background on data collection and management methods as well as conventions applicable to each of the exported datasets.

Monday, February 3, 2025

Primarily for researchers benefit, the Terms of Reference of the Data Access Committee were approved at its meeting on 3rd February 2025. A further annex of guidance for applicants will be published in due course. Access the Document here.

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Using a mobile phone for extended periods is not linked with an increased risk of brain cancer, according to the COSMOS study.

The Airwave Study continues to follow up on the risk of cancer in relation to the use of Airwave. Our first analysis in 2018 is explained here.

Thursday, August 29, 2024

The response to the call for expressions of interest for participants interested in joining the Airwave Participant Advisory Group (APAG) was overwhelming, with 348 participants submitting the form by August 2023. The unexpectedly high levels of interest in the APAG amongst the cohort has provided an invaluable opportunity to learn more about their experiences on the study in the form of a participant experience survey. You can read the results of the experience survey here

• Airwave PPIE survey report V5

Tuesday, May 21, 2024

After substantial interest from the Airwave cohort, we have recently set up the Airwave participant advisory group (APAG) comprising of 8 participants across England, Scotland and Wales. 240 participants have also recently completed a survey as part of Dr Kirsten Bell's research into Airwave study participation and involvement. Thank you to all participants who applied to be part of the APAG, we received over 400 applications!

Last month, we held our first meeting with the group which included representation from the Airwave Study team as well as members from the Patient Experience Research Centre (PERC), based at Imperial College London.

Principal Investigator, Professor Paul Elliott opened the meeting with a summary of the Airwave Health Monitoring Study so far and plans for future research, before a broader discussion with the APAG about their experiences as Airwave study participants.

A recording of Professor Elliott's talk can be seen using the link below:

Airwave Participant Advisory Group - Professor Paul Elliott

Thursday, April 25, 2024

We are pleased to be working with the University of Manchester to offer all Airwave participants the opportunity to take an at-home hearing test. We will email the invitations to participants over the next few weeks. If you do not receive an email and believe you are eligible to take part, please contact us at airwave@imperial.ac.uk

Further information and FAQs can be found here.

Friday, June 16, 2023

We're always interested in news items where we're mentioned, and especially when it's a good-news story. This link from Bristol University celebrates a substantial funding award to the UK LLC, to which the Airwave Study is a key contributor.

Friday, February 24, 2023

We would like to tell you about another exciting opportunity for Airwave to contribute to research on the nation’s health.

The Study has been invited to take part in the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration ("UK LLC") which aims to create a national research resource for both scientific discoveries and to support the translation of those into NHS practice.

The UK LLC has been built and is run entirely through a collaboration of UK Universities, the NHS, and the Office for National Statistics. It brings together de-personalised study data from over twenty research studies which will provide a rich source of data to investigate environmental and genetic influences on future health including COVID-19, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and mental health.

It will be kept up to date as time goes on using data obtained from participants’ NHS health records. As with all Airwave Study data, we appreciate the critical importance of ensuring the security and protection of participants’ data. The data in LLC are held in a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) run by the University of Bristol. This is a computer system where approved researchers can access and study data in a way that safeguards participants’ data. The TRE stores all data in the UK and researchers cannot remove data from the system. Its security is checked by NHS and ISO27001 professional auditors, ensuring it meets the global standard of security that the Airwave data are already held in by Imperial College.

Airwave and the Police Federation will continue to control who can use your data for what purposes in the UK LLC.

You can find out more about the UK LLC. Unless you tell us otherwise, we will include your data in UK LLC later this year, and there’s nothing else you need to do. If you don’t want your data to be included in UK LLC, please write to us at airwave@imperial.ac.uk or enter your information at Update Your Details and we’ll ensure that your records are withheld.

Thursday, January 26, 2023

In this, the 2023 edition of our newsletter, you can read about:

• Some of our recent research findings, our ongoing work, and future plans
• How the Study supports the NHS & national scientific discoveries via the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC)
• The Airwave Study’s contribution to COVID-19 research
• The relaunched follow-up health-screening programme
• Future plans to offer a home hearing test to Airwave participants
• A work of art inspired by interviews with Airwave participants

We hope you find it interesting.

• Newsletter-2023

Friday, May 20, 2022

Researchers using the Airwave dataset may wish to begin using Version 2 of the Data Dictionary and its annexes. More annexes and appendices will be published in due course. Please refer to the Researchers menu item on the main page.

We would be pleased to receive feedback from researchers via the usual channels.

The data itself is available in the DPUK Research Environment for researchers external to Imperial College.

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

We have updated our Privacy Notice for participants, which you can find here.

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

We are pleased that the Airwave Health Tissue Bank is now listed as a cohort by the Catalogue of Mental Health Measures, an interactive catalogue of mental health and well-being measures in British cohort and longitudinal studies. See our entry here. (Note that the reference, as originally published, to NIH and NHS being funders is incorrect and will be corrected).

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

During 2021, we have been working with Stefanie Posavec, an artist-in-residence with the People Like You project, where she visualised the Airwave Study. Aimed at showing how visualisation and art can be useful for biobanks and cohort studies, the results of her work are available here.

I think we all agree they offer a fresh perspective on the Project.

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

The follow-up programme remains suspended because of the practical difficulties of running health-screens during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, all feedback letters relating to screens that were completed prior to the suspension of follow-up have now been sent to participants. Please get in touch if you were expecting a letter but haven't yet received it.

Thursday, April 23, 2020

From March 16th 2020, the Airwave follow-up programme has been suspended due to the latest government advice concerning COVID-19.

We are currently unable to send feedback letters to participants for those appointments that have been completed. This is because remote access to the servers where participants' data is maintained is not yet available from remote locations. We are working on this and will provide an update as soon as possible.

Thursday, April 23, 2020

You may notice that our website now looks slightly different from before. In fact, it's been rebuilt entirely to bring us into line with new regulations on the use of cookies, and to upgrade the content-management-system, Drupal.

You might notice that some of the links you saved no longer work (though we have tried to preserve as many as possible), and a lot of the old news stories have been reorganised into different menus.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any comments on the new design.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

We're pleased to be publishing our second newsletter, which brings everyone up to date with progress on the Study as of November 2019.

We emailed details of the newsletter to all members of the cohort for whom we have a working email address; others will have received the newsletter in the post.

We'd prefer to remain in contact with participants via email, as it reduces our costs. If your email or home address has changed recently, you can update us via our secure portal. Alternatively, call us at 0808 178 3242.

If you have technical difficulties with the newsletter, you may need Adobe Acrobat Reader software, which you can install freely here.

• newsletter-2019

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

We are occasionally asked by participants to send copies of their health-screening feedback letter from when they joined the cohort. Unfortunately, because these letters are now in the deep archive, we are unable to do this.

However, if a medical professional believes that certain historic information is potentially relevant to your current healthcare plan, please ask him or her to write to Dr Deepa Singh and we will do what is possible and necessary. We may ask you to provide explicit consent before doing this.

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Due to changes in funding arrangements, as of 1^st January 2018 members of the Airwave Health Monitoring Study and Tissue Bank will no longer be members of the NIHR BioResource.  Consenting participants will remain part of the Imperial BioResource.

Members of the INTERVAL and COMPARE studies who consented to join the Imperial BioResource will revert to their membership of the national study and their data held by the Imperial BioResource will be deleted.

Thursday, November 23, 2017

We are pleased to announce that the Airwave Study has become a member cohort within Dementias Platform UK (DPUK).  DPUK is the public-private research initiative aimed at identifying the causes of dementia and accelerating the development of new treatments. The Airwave Study will actively participate in research studies by providing access to pseudo-anonymised extracts of its data and by making its own proposals for research that will exploit the power of this powerful initiative.