Performance evaluation of the smartphone-based AI cough monitoring app - Hyfe Cough Tracker against solicited respiratory sounds

Summary

Hyfe Cough Tracker app showed a very high correlation between the cough rate measured by Hyfe and that of human annotators (Pearson correlation of 0.968).

Emerging technologies to remotely monitor patients’ cough show promise for various clinical applications. Currently available cough detection systems all represent a trade-off between convenience and performance. The accuracy of such technologies is highly contingent on the clinical settings in which they are intended to be used. Moreover, establishing gold standards to measure this accuracy is challenging. We present the first performance evaluation study of the Hyfe Cough Tracker app, a passive cough monitoring smartphone application. We evaluate performance for cough detection using continuous audio recordings and cough counting by trained individuals as the gold standard. We propose standard procedures to use multi-observer cough sound annotation from continuous audio recordings as the gold standard for evaluating automated cough detection devices.