COVID-19 smartphone app can tell if you're an asymptomatic carrier -- by the way you cough
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As millions of people worldwide battle the symptoms of COVID-19, a group of “silent patients” may not even know they’re sick and spreading the virus. Asymptomatic people, by definition, have no physical symptoms of the illnesses they carry. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) however, say they may be showing symptoms after all — in the sound of their cough. Their study has created an artificial intelligence program that can identify if someone has coronavirus by the way their coughing sounds.
Researchers programmed their AI model with thousands of different recorded coughs from both healthy and sick volunteers. When they fed in recordings of new patients, the system accurately detected 98.5 percent of coughs coming from people with a confirmed case of COVID-19. AI also successfully picked out 100 percent of asymptomatic cases from volunteers who reported not having any symptoms but tested positive for the virus.
... snip ...
The team created a website to collect audio samples from volunteers, including many with coronavirus. From nearly 200,000 forced-cough audio samples, the group was able to find 2,500 recordings that came from confirmed COVID-19 patients. Many of these patients were also asymptomatic. After adding more random samples to act as a control, the team chose 4,000 coughing samples to train their AI model to screen for the virus.
Along with amazing accuracy in detecting coronavirus patients, researchers say the tests reveal “a striking similarity between Alzheimer’s and COVID discrimination.” They add that the same four biomarkers for detecting Alzheimer’s effectively screen out the virus as well.
“We think this shows that the way you produce sound, changes when you have Covid, even if you’re asymptomatic,” the research scientist in MIT’s Auto-ID Laboratory adds.
More at:
https://www.studyfinds.org/coronavirus-app-asymptomatic-carrier-cough/
Sounds promising....
= new reply since forum marked as read
