New smartphone app detects child’s illness through cough

Researchers have developed a smartphone app that can help identify childhood respiratory disorders through their cough, making it easier when the option of seeing a doctor is unavailable at the time. 

Researchers at University of Queensland came up with a smartphone app that detects respiratory disorders in children with the help of cough-analyzing technology.

The team gathered a database of cough audio recordings from 1,437 hospitalized children aged 29 days to 12 years old, who had a variety of already conventionally-diagnose respiratory illnesses, reported New Atlas.

New smartphone app capable of ‘hearing’ ear infections through paper

Through machine learning algorithms similar to those used to develop speech recognition systems, the team then used 852 of the recordings to train an app to recognize the distant sounds linked to pneumonia, croup, asthma, bronchiolitis, and general lower respiratory tract disease.

The app was then used to diagnose the other 585 children based on their recordings, and resulted in accuracy that ranged from 81% to 97%, according to Science Daily.

The team now aims to further refine the app with hopes that it could be used by parents residing in remote areas that lack medical facilities, by doctors who are remotely consulting with patients, or even as an additional diagnostic system by physicians examining children within their own clinics.

“It can be difficult to differentiate between respiratory disorders in children, even for experienced doctors,” said lead researcher Paul Porter. “This study demonstrates how new technology, mathematical concepts, machine learning and clinical medicine can be successfully combined to produce completely new diagnostic tests.”