A team of scientists have developed a tool that allows people to send online recordings of their coughs to help the development of COVID-19 research. Called Coughvid, the online tool uses artificial intelligence to read whether the user is at risk of coronavirus. Soon, the device will also be available on mobile phones, in the form of an application.
Countries have continuously turned to technology in the fight against the spread of coronavirus. In some places, governments are using sophisticated cameras to detect possible infections in public places. Elsewhere, other countries have constructed databases out of their health and customs records in an attempt to help predict and track the spread of the virus.
Researchers from the Swiss University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, started building the app after doctors reported that those afflicted with coronavirus had a unique cough. Tomas Teijeiro, a member of the research team, said the group had gathered over fifteen thousand samples of coughs so far, with one thousand of them coming from coronavirus patients. “We have a lot of contact with medical doctors and some of them told us that they were able to distinguish, quite well, from sound of the cough, if patients were probably infected," Teijeiro told Business Insider. The samples collected so far are due to be added to the Coughvid app and used to help improve the AI.
To donate your cough, you just need to visit the Coughvid website and click on the record button. While the option to do it through an app isn’t currently available, you can still visit the web portal and provide a recording by granting the website access to your microphone. When done, you will be presented with a short questionnaire asking for your current condition, age, gender, and any additional symptoms you might be experiencing. To ensure that you limit the spread of any germs when you cough, hold your phone at arms’ length and cough into your elbow or a napkin. Even though the cough will be masked this way, it still should be picked up by the device's microphone.
Coughvid is yet another tool in the ongoing fight against COVID-19. Coughvid requires people to decide to donate their coughs to the service and this is an important distinction, compared to some of the other tools and services that have used more intrusive methods to track the virus, such as fever-recording flying drones. While coronavirus screening tools need data to be effective, at the same time, they should also respect privacy. Hopefully, more tools in the same vein as Coughvid will appear in due course, and the data these programs collect will aid in the fight against COVID-19.
Source: Business Insider
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