IISc will collect sound samples of patients’ cough, breath for Covid-19 diagnosis

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, is working on a tool for diagnosis of COVID-19 based on respiratory, cough and speech sounds.

IISc will soon collaborate with hospitals, nodal and district health centres across India to develop a database of sound samples, cough, breath, and voice, from Covid-19 patients

The tool will offer a test which poses minimum risk of exposure to the healthcare professional and can give the results faster than the current testing method.

Sriram Ganapathy, assistant professor, department of electrical engineering, IISc, said “Our data will be generated in an Indian context because voice and cough sounds are affected by various local conditions such as weather and pollution. Using data from an external world can therefore be problematic since our population data may not match algorithms developed to build the Covid-19 diagnostic tool. We would like to enroll hospitals and health centres in the five major cities with high infection rates”

The sound data comprises nine categories, Breathing (shallow and deep),  cough (shallow and heavy), three kinds of sustained vowel phonation and counting 1 to 20 (normal and fast-paced).

The team collected respiratory sound samples from 1,000 participants, including healthy individuals, those with respiratory infections and Covid-19 patients via worldwide crowd sourcing using a website application to establish proof of their concept.