Will cough recognition prevent the spread of Covid-19 pandemic?

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During the past nine months, have you ever worried about whether your cough is a result of a pandemic, or is it just a clearing your throat mechanism? If so, do not worry because MIT researchers have found that a healthy cough differs from the one resulting from COVID-19. This difference is not recognizable by human ears but it is not a concern because it can be detected by an AI model.

MIT team has been working on cough recognition systems since before the outburst of a pandemic to determine whether they can detect Alzheimer’s disease based on forced cough recordings. This disease is associated with weakened vocal cords and frequent displays of frustration as compared to expressing happiness. They trained the algorithm to determine the strength of vocal cords based on the sound “mmmm” and to detect emotions based on a dataset of actors imitating emotions while speaking. They then trained another neural network to distinguish changes in respiratory performance based on coughs.

The team found out that this AI framework can correctly identify Alzheimer’s disease based on vocal cord strength, sentiment, and lung and respiratory performance.

With the coronavirus onset, they started wondering if Alzheimer’s AI framework will work for Covid-19 diagnosis. With AI that could pick a person’s gender, mother tongue, or emotional states based on cough, there was nothing against trying diagnosing Covid-19.

The MIT researchers collected a database from April till May 2020. They enabled a website where people recorded their coughs and filled a survey on symptoms they are experiencing and whether they have been diagnosed with Covid-19 or not. They collected more than 70000 samples of forced cough. Around 2500 were samples from people medically diagnosed with Covid-19. They used these 2500 samples along with around 2500 samples randomly selected. From these, they randomly picked 4256 samples to train the AI, and 1064 to feed into the model. The model surprisingly accurately identified 98,5% of cough samples. And it accurately identified all asymptomatic coughs.

The tool is meant to distinguish asymptomatic coughs from healthy coughs. The AI framework is not meant to diagnose symptomatic people because of other illnesses that may produce similar effects. The team now partners with several hospitals in order to collect the larger, more diverse group of samples. They are also working on an app based on their AI model.

Imagine how easier it would be for us to simply wake up in the morning, force-cough to our phone’s microphones, and know if we are infected or not. It is a non-invasive, zero cost, real-time, and any-time procedure that could benefit the whole society. I believe it could put the pandemic in the past.

 

Sources:

https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-19-cough-cellphone-detection-1029 (accessed 2 October 2020)

https://www.embs.org/ojemb/articles/covid-19-artificial-intelligence-diagnosis-using-only-cough-recordings/  (accessed 2 October 2020)

https://www.engadget.com/ai-covid-19-cough-detection-from-recordings-213858299.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKCU4HDs6WzarwZcQtP0JSzqUC2KDmP5NAm8o-jzu0hjobCPGio2pqz8My3LuT493Ab8nQLScaxLFO1SEHLLbc8w16JVt-qAh-vZUL1kBvXys287-Uqnnou5bdhABkvcJEuKdEenZ44rZ_IkUNSM6hle3_OLIbe0kYiiVoMf97u8(accessed 2 October 2020)

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/30/cough-scrutinizing-ai-shows-major-promise-as-an-early-warning-system-for-covid-19/ (accessed 2 October 2020)

 

2 thoughts on “Will cough recognition prevent the spread of Covid-19 pandemic?

  1. Birnbaum Karolina says:

    Thanks for sharing, Oriana. A very interesting post! I must say I would never think that something like this may ever exist ;). I am impressed! I am sure it will gain popularity more and more especially when I think that this may minimize the pandemic.

  2. Pluta Oriana says:

    Thank you for the comment. It is indeed very impressive. They are waiting for FDA’s approval still.

    But giving it more thought, it would be extremely difficult to introduce this app. There are some questions needed to be answered. What will the app do after recognising “covid-cough”? Does it automatically send you on quarantine? How do we make it mandatory for people to install and use it?

    Quess, we can just wait and see 🙂

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