Cough against COVID? Yes, this app tests you for coronavirus through the sound of you coughing

The rush to understand, predict and head off the COVID-19 outbreak has prompted researchers worldwide to create several tools to detect the virus and has driven them to analyse hundreds of ways to avoid the virus.

Professor Rita Singh of Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh has created a tool to determine the COVID-19 infection through the sound of a person’s cough, speech or even the sound of breathing.

Currently, most of these efforts are at a stage in which the researchers are gathering speech and coughing recordings are and fed to ai algorithms  to determine whether someone has the COVID-19 infection

The COVID-19 voice detector - as professor Singh calls it traces the micro signatures of one’s voice, which are not audible to the untrained listener but are nevertheless present.

Any condition affecting the lungs or the respiratory system – as has been established in the cases of COVID-19 infection - has a palpable effect on voice. The tool is basically a self-learning system that is now trying to learn signatures of a COVID-19 infection in the voice, not just in the cough.

Cough against COVID?

A similar initiative is being carried out by the Mumbai-based Washwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Wadhwani’s ‘cough against covid’ mobile application asks users to record the sound of their coughing to conduct a test for COVID-19.

As the disease brings much of the world to a halt, scientists and health experts have called for technology to play a bigger part in tackling the pandemic – which has grown too quickly for conventional containment tools to have an effect.

Where on one side the researchers are working on detecting the infection from sound of cough,  another study shows that the two-metre distance considered a safe measure to avoid close contact is not safe enough.

Two metres not enough?

A recent study suggests that two metres might not be far enough away if someone lets an uncovered cough loose in your direction.

Explorations by virologists at a Canadian hospital show that cough airflows produced by human subjects is naturally infected with seasonal flu. As per the study, if someone coughs without any protective gear from a couple of metres away, then the cough has reached you and is still moving. The study also shows that as much as 10 per cent of the fine droplets from cough remain suspended in the air even after four seconds. The findings support the calls for a verification of social distancing measures during the ongoing pandemic.

Dry, don't blow

A third such UK-based study shows that hands dried on paper towel spread less virus to other surfaces. The researchers deliberately contaminated four people’s hands with a harmless virus and dried them in four different ways. The average surface contamination was more than 10 times higher after contact with jet air dried hands compared with those dried on paper towels.