Digital health technologies have the potential to make cough monitoring as commonplace as sleep tracking, offering new insights for health management. Let’s start with a quick trivia: how often does a healthy person cough in a day? If you guessed 4.6 times, you are spot on. This statistic from a recent study underscores how little attention we typically pay to our coughs—until they become frequent and noticeable. Coughs account for one in five reasons we seek medical assistance.
The Importance of Cough Monitoring
Traditionally, tracking coughs hasn’t been easy. While primary care physicians have long used coughs to differentiate between conditions, the ability to self-monitor this symptom can offer significant insights. Advances in digital health are now facilitating cough tracking, potentially making it as common as step tracking. This could provide individual patients and doctors with deeper health insights.
Why Track Coughs?
Why should we invest in cough monitoring? Cough is a potent biomarker. Basic information about daily cough counts and patterns can help patients make informed decisions. For example, patients with COPD or asthma could detect impending flare-ups, preventing the need for intensive treatment. Increased cough frequency in a region might indicate allergens or infections, aiding public health authorities in taking preventive measures.
Dr. Peter Small, Chief Medical Officer at Hyfe AI, emphasizes the transformative potential of cough data. “It’s going to transform the whole clinical approach for this common and chronic symptom. Patients will come in, have the data on how much they are coughing, and the physician can suggest a treatment based on that information to see if it makes the coughs better.”
Digital Health Tools for Cough Monitoring
Cough monitoring tools can be divided into two categories: smartphone apps and specialized hardware, both leveraging AI to enhance their capabilities.
Smartphone Apps
Given that the average person uses nine smartphone apps daily, a cough monitoring app fits seamlessly into daily life. Apps like CoughTracker and CoughPro use AI to identify, record, and analyze coughs, providing users with contextual summaries.
Other notable apps include Swasaa and Raisonance. Swasaa combines cough recordings with other health metrics like temperature and oxygen saturation to assess lung performance, offering an affordable alternative to spirometry. Raisonance’s AudibleHealth Dx app started by identifying COVID-19 infections from cough recordings and is expanding to diagnose influenza and tuberculosis.
Dedicated Cough-Monitoring Hardware
Dedicated hardware, primarily used for research, offers further insights. The clinically validated VitaloJAK, a wearable device, tracks up to 24 hours of cough recordings and has been used in clinical studies. Another example is the RESP Biosensor from Strados, a wearable patch for continuous cough and lung sound monitoring.
For patient use, the wheezy system from Respiri detects abnormal breath sounds and allows users to generate logs for healthcare review. These devices exemplify how dedicated hardware can enhance the understanding and management of respiratory conditions.
The Role of AI in Cough Monitoring
AI is at the core of modern cough monitoring tools, a technology termed “acoustic AI.” By training on large datasets of annotated sounds, AI can recognize and classify sounds like heart murmurs, wheezes, or coughs. Integrated into digital stethoscopes, these algorithms can improve diagnostic capabilities and assist with medical management decisions. For consumers, they offer a better understanding of chronic conditions.
Dr. Peter Small of Hyfe AI explains, “When incorporated into digital stethoscopes, they can improve the diagnostic capabilities of clinicians. By tracking their frequency, they can assist with medical management decisions. And ultimately, when incorporated in consumer products, they will empower patients to have a better understanding of and be better able to cope with their chronic medical conditions.”
Privacy and Data Security
Developing efficient AI tools for cough monitoring requires quality training data. Ensuring privacy and obtaining explicit consent from users to use their cough recordings are crucial steps developers must take to address concerns and protect user data.
Conclusion
The integration of digital health technologies into cough monitoring is poised to transform how we understand and manage this common symptom. With tools ranging from smartphone apps to specialized hardware, and AI playing a central role, the potential benefits for individual health management and clinical assessment are immense. As these technologies evolve, they promise to empower patients and enhance the diagnostic capabilities of healthcare providers, making cough monitoring an invaluable part of digital health.
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