QUCoughScope: An Artificially Intelligent Mobile Application to Detect Asymptomatic COVID-19 Patients using Cough and Breathing Sounds

Chowdhury, Muhammad E. H.; Ibtehaz, Nabil; Rahman, Tawsifur; Mekki, Yosra Magdi Salih; Qibalwey, Yazan; Mahmud, Sakib; Ezeddin, Maymouna; Zughaier, Susu; Al-Maadeed, Sumaya Ali S A

In the break of COVID-19 pandemic, mass testing has become essential to reduce the spread of the virus. Several recent studies suggest that a significant number of COVID-19 patients display no physical symptoms whatsoever. Therefore, it is unlikely that these patients will undergo COVID-19 test, which increases their chances of unintentionally spreading the virus. Currently, the primary diagnostic tool to detect COVID-19 is RT-PCR test on collected respiratory specimens from the suspected case. This requires patients to travel to a laboratory facility to be tested, thereby potentially infecting others along the way.It is evident from recent researches that asymptomatic COVID-19 patients cough and breath in a different way than the healthy people. Several research groups have created mobile and web-platform for crowdsourcing the symptoms, cough and breathing sounds from healthy, COVID-19 and Non-COVID patients. Some of these data repositories were made public. We have received such a repository from Cambridge University team under data-sharing agreement, where we have cough and breathing sound samples for 582 and 141 healthy and COVID-19 patients, respectively. 87 COVID-19 patients were asymptomatic, while rest of them have cough. We have developed an Android application to automatically screen COVID-19 from the comfort of people homes. Test subjects can simply download a mobile application, enter their symptoms, record an audio clip of their cough and breath, and upload the data anonymously to our servers. Our backend server converts the audio clip to spectrogram and then apply our state-of-the-art machine learning model to classify between cough sounds produced by COVID-19 patients, as opposed to healthy subjects or those with other respiratory conditions. The system can detect asymptomatic COVID-19 patients with a sensitivity more than 91%.