MIT Researchers Use mHealth Tools to Identify COVID-19 in a Cough

November 03, 2020 - Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing an mHealth tool that can detect evidence of COVID-19 in one’s cough.

In a study recently published in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, the team of researchers used tens of thousands of samples of [people coughing and talking, and were able to create an AI tool that could accurately identify coronavirus symptoms 98.5 percent of the time among those who’d tested positive for the virus and in every asymptomatic case.

“The sounds of talking and coughing are both influenced by the vocal cords and surrounding organs,” Brian Subirana, a research scientists in MIT’s Auto-ID Laboratory and co-author of the study, said in a press release published by the university. “This means that when you talk, part of your talking is like coughing, and vice versa. It also means that things we easily derive from fluent speech, AI can pick up simply from coughs, including things like the person’s gender, mother tongue, or even emotional state. There’s in fact sentiment embedded in how you cough.”