Evaluation in a real environment of a trainable cough monitoring app for smartphones

Carlos Hoyos-Barceló*, José Ramón Garmendia-Leiza, María Dolores Aguilar-García, Jesús Monge-Álvarez, Diego Asay Pérez-Alonso, Carlos Alberola-López, Pablo Casaseca-de-la-Higuera

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)
100 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This paper presents SmartCough, an M-health app for Android smartphones that monitors cough trends in patients with respiratory diseases. The app is designed to be battery-efficient, fast, and robust against noise. It relies on efficiently-implemented machine learning algorithms that have been validated in laboratory conditions. Since these conditions are rarely met in a real situation where the user carries the phone inside their pocket or bag, the app features a self-training module that allows easy adaptation to new environments. In this paper, we have evaluated the app with real patients in an outdoor setting to test the performance in real environments that are hostile to cough detection. Our results show that the average sensitivity obtained in laboratory conditions drops significantly (down to 60%) when the baseline configuration is employed. By activating the built-in self-training module, the median sensitivity raises to 85.87% after a small training step, with a bounded false positive rate. The achieved performance is analogous to the one obtained in laboratory conditions, making the app suitable for use in real life scenarios.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication15th Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing – MEDICON 2019 - Proceedings of MEDICON and Computing and
EditorsJorge Henriques, Paulo de Carvalho, Nuno Neves
PublisherSpringer
Pages1175-1180
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9783030316358
ISBN (Print)9783030316341
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 25 Sept 2019
Event15th Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, MEDICON 2019 - Coimbra, Portugal
Duration: 26 Sept 201928 Sept 2019

Publication series

NameIFMBE Proceedings
Volume76
ISSN (Print)1680-0737
ISSN (Electronic)1433-9277

Conference

Conference15th Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, MEDICON 2019
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityCoimbra
Period26/09/1928/09/19

Keywords

  • Android
  • Cough detection
  • M-health
  • Optimization

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