Cough & Speech Sounds For COVID-19 Diagnosis? Find Out What Researchers Are Doing

New Delhi: Researchers are leaving no stone unturned in finding a tool to diagnose COVID-19. In the latest effort, an eight-member team of researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, is working on a tool based on respiratory, cough and speech sounds, reported PTI.

Once the toll is validated, it will offer a test, which poses a minimum risk of exposure to the healthcare professional and can give the results faster than the current testing method, the report said.

The speech and sound-based diagnostics has been named “Coswara”, with an aim to detect and quantify biomarkers of the disease in the acoustics of these sounds.

According to the team, as the pandemic is growing in numbers, the development of simplistic, cost-effective and fast testing for infection has become a crucial component in healthcare, policy making and economic revival of several countries.

“As the major symptoms of the disease include respiratory problems, the proposed project aims to detect and quantify the biomarkers of the disease in the acoustics of these sounds. The project requires participants to perform a recording of breathing sounds, cough sounds, sustained phonation of vowel sounds and a counting exercise. The entire response requires about five minutes of recording time,” a team member told PTI.

The project being supervised by IISc faculty member Sriram Ganapathy is in the data collection stage and will go through an experimental validation before obtaining full approval as a potential diagnostic tool.