Coronavirus
AI Model Used by MIT Researchers to Detect a COVID-19 Cough
How soon will an app be available?
While watching an Italian TV talk show last night, I listened to a biologist and journalist, Barbara Gallavotti, who was being interviewed. She spoke about how researchers at MIT were developing an app that could tell whether a person was an asymptomatic COVID-19 case or whether they were free of the virus simply by analyzing the sound of their coughs. Her initial reaction was that it must be some kind of joke!
She investigated its publication in the IEEXplore journal and discovered it was indeed promising. She then played a sample of two people coughing. One was asymptomatic while the other indicated that they were COVID-19 free and could go out without infecting anyone else.
I was unable to tell the difference between the two coughs, like most people on the show. But the researchers have done extensive research on this AI model. The prospects are promising that they may be able to develop a suitable phone app for this. This would replace the tracking and tracing apps which have been a flop in Germany, Italy, and Australia. The UK government is now under pressure to urgently change its test and trace system. The much-vaunted Operation Moonshot which was supposed to be groundbreaking missed…
