Exploring Automatic COVID-19 Diagnosis via voice and symptoms from Crowdsourced Data

Han, Jing; Brown, Chloe; Chauhan, Jagmohan; Grammenos, Andreas; Hasthanasombat, Apinan; Spathis, Dimitris; Xia, Tong; Cicuta, Pietro; Mascolo, Cecilia

The development of fast and accurate screening tools, which could facilitate testing and prevent more costly clinical tests, is key to the current pandemic of COVID-19. In this context, some initial work shows promise in detecting diagnostic signals of COVID-19 from audio sounds. In this paper, we propose a voice-based framework to automatically detect individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework on a subset of data crowdsourced from our app, containing 828 samples from 343 participants. By combining voice signals and reported symptoms, an AUC of $0.79$ has been attained, with a sensitivity of $0.68$ and a specificity of $0.82$. We hope that this study opens the door to rapid, low-cost, and convenient pre-screening tools to automatically detect the disease.