Alternatives to Manual Cough Journaling
Cough, for its frequency and consistency, has rarely been considered as a diagnostic requirement. Moreover, it is customary to take down coughing as a sign of underlying disease during the clinical presentation. A step further would be documenting whether the cough is of a productive or nonproductive variety.
Understanding The Different Facets of Coughs
When a patient expresses a cough complaint, the physician documents it as subjective data. Therefore, this manual account cannot assess the actual representation of the cough as it occurs.
A recurrent cough is usually considered an underlying sign of a respiratory disease process. However, it is rather tempting to overlook associations between a cough and non-respiratory conditions, often causing coughs, such as GERD or heart failure. This is often why diagnosis for such conditions can be delayed as patients present to respiratory specialists.
It is also customary to overlook possible triggers of a chronic cough. These can include exposure to allergens, a cough that occurs only at night, or even occupational associations to a cough.
Coughs, for most, are only divided into ones that either have the production of sputum and the ones that do not. Additionally, manual cough journaling fails to record the frequency, time, exposure, and sound of a cough — all essentials towards diagnosing underlying medical conditions.
Dawn Of Digital Cough Recording
Studies over the past few decades have indicated how manual cough journaling can be both tedious and unreliable. Manual cough monitors have been tested through analog devices and have gone through several iterations over time. The manual recorders assess coughs as waveforms, analyzing frequency and amplitude. However, many of these monitors have been bulky and obtrusive, reducing compliance in monitoring.
Another vital consideration is that cough monitoring in history has required a trained professional to operate these devices and even read the results. Unfortunately, this prerequisite means patients undergoing cough monitoring would have to stay overnight, potentially excluding natural elements such as environmental exposure that contributed toward a cough.
These cough recordings also went through bias as to what qualified for a cough. So, either technician or patient bias was possible, limiting data that could have probably helped formulate a diagnosis.
Today, with technology, manual cough journaling has observed some respite. For one, cough journaling can now be continuous. Most of the tracking takes place on “smart devices,” so there are fewer chances of missed coughs. Additionally, “smart devices” are superb at picking up the tiniest changes observed with coughs.
Following the dawn of digital cough journaling, the software can store collected data on secure servers with easy access for both patients and healthcare professionals. With machines collecting the data, information also helps to generate algorithms for better tracking and analyzing, which in turn prompts further innovation to fine-tune the needs.
How to Approach Digital Cough Recording?
Healthcare professionals should encourage patients to log symptoms before disease onset. For instance, fundamental vital signs such as resting heart rates and respiratory rates can provide essential insights during the clinical presentation. Additionally, tracking coughs at their onset can help analyze the trajectory of how a cough progresses. This data provides valuable information on whether exposure or underlying disease process could be responsible for the cough.
Objective cough recording has tremendous potential by going hand in hand with symptom recording. For instance, fever, sputum production, swelling, heartburn, skin changes are essential clues for narrowing down a diagnostic pool.
Applications on smart devices to record coughs can track such related data, providing a holistic picture that a healthcare provider can evaluate.
A great example of how this could have been implemented was assessing coughs at the outset of the COVID19 pandemic. If the population tracked coughs and related symptoms, health systems could have rapidly identified regions showing increasing respiratory symptoms — signs of a possible epidemic outbreak. Then, epidemiologists would have seamlessly shared the big data pool to hasten on-ground protocols for epidemic outbreak management.
Prospects of Digital Cough Journaling
Healthtech has experienced an exponential surge during the pandemic, primarily due to healthcare access and delivery gaping inefficiencies. Infectious epidemics also limit the ability to provide treatment for other health conditions due to limitations imposed for global safety.
This scarcity of healthcare has encouraged individuals to become more diligent when managing their health with the limited resources available. Tracking symptoms and relaying them to healthcare professionals remotely is an inevitable future. Remote healthcare enabled by digital technology reduces time, cost and allows for the easy dispensing of healthcare, which is a universal fundamental human right.
Additionally, collecting cough data globally helps streamline innovation towards more effective diagnosis. The insights resulting from this data can also funnel research into methods that can become more cost-effective in managing underlying disease conditions that present as a cough.
Today, AI models are capable of analyzing best practices in the communication of disease outcomes to patients. Such novel technological applications encourage healthcare to take a more personalized approach to disease management versus the one-size-fits-all that is currently present.
Dr. Michelle Frank is a healthcare consultant working in the FemTech space. Her work centers around building and fostering online women’s health communities. Read more about her latest work here.
