Google AI could soon use a person’s cough to diagnose disease

Machine-learning system trained on millions of human audio clips shows promise for detecting COVID-19 and tuberculosis.

A team led by Google scientists has developed a machine-learning tool that can help to detect and monitor health conditions by evaluating noises such as coughing and breathing. The artificial intelligence (AI) system1, trained on millions of audio clips of human sounds, might one day be used by physicians to diagnose diseases including COVID-19 and tuberculosis and to assess how well a person’s lungs are functioning.

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This is not the first time a research group has explored using sound as a biomarker for disease. The concept gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scientists discovered that it was possible to detect the respiratory disease through a person’s cough2.

What’s new about the Google system — called Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) — is the massive data set that it was trained on, and the fact that it can be fine-tuned to perform multiple tasks. 

.... (Full paper, Nature)