CoughVid

An artificial intelligence-based system that can listen to your cough and indicate whether you have COVID-19.

CoughVid uses artificial intelligence to distinguish between different types of coughs based on their sound. The idea is not new. Doctors already listen to their patients’ coughs to diagnose whooping cough, asthma and pneumonia.

Thank you to spread the word about our website, on which people can record the sounds of their coughs and help us build a comprehensive database.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, mass coronavirus testing has proven essential to governments in monitoring the spread of the disease, isolating infected individuals, and effectively “flattening the curve” of infections over time [1]. However, this oropharyngeal swab test is physically invasive and must be performed by a trained clinician. This requires patients to travel to a laboratory facility to get tested, thereby potentially infecting others along the way [2]. Ideally, testing would be performed noninvasively at no cost, and administered at the homes of potential patients to minimize contamination risk.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that 67.7% of COVID-19 patients exhibit a “dry cough,” meaning that no mucus is produced, unlike the typical “wet cough” that occurs during a cold or allergies [3]. Dry coughs can be distinguished from wet coughs by the sound they produce, which raises the question of whether COVID-19 can be diagnosed by analyzing patients’ cough sounds. Such cough sounds analysis has proven successful in diagnosing respiratory conditions like pertussis [4], asthma, and pneumonia [5].

At the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, we propose to leverage signal processing, pervasive computing, and machine learning to develop an Android application and website to automatically screen COVID-19 from the comfort of people’s homes. Test subjects will be able to simply download a mobile application, enter their symptoms, record an audio clip of their cough, and upload the data anonymously to our servers. We will then use state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to classify between cough sounds produced by COVID-19 patients, as opposed to healthy subjects or those with other respiratory conditions.

Thank you to spread the word about our website, on which people can record the sounds of their coughs and help us build a comprehensive database.

Lara Orlandic Master student in Electrical Engineering
Aurélien Kinet Master student in EE
Maja Stamenkovic Master student in Computer Science
Stefano Vojinovic Master student in EE
Alon Tchelet Master student in EE
Tomas Teijeiro Postdoc researcher in the ESL
David Atienza Head of the ESL