Having a way to monitor and track your cough accurately is essential to help doctors with their diagnosis, even more so when Covid-19 has caused a global pandemic. Hyfe App can help medical professionals with that task. However, it can be a challenge with all the ambient coughs around us. Let’s find out why tracking ambient coughs are so important.
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Hyfe App Can Easily Track Ambient Coughs
An App to Help with Tracking Coughs
Seeing the untapped potential of using cough info, one of Hyfe’s founders has developed a tool to help people monitor their coughs and, therefore, their health on a daily basis. Taking advantage of the handheld devices that everybody has right in their pocket, Hyfe has come up with a free smartphone downloadable application that tracks any users’ cough anytime.
The machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in the app enable it to easily adapt to people’s different tones and noises whenever they cough. In addition, Hyfe helps identify cough trends and tracks cough frequency.
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What Are Ambient Coughs?
The coughs that come from other people, i.e., not the app user, are considered ambient coughs. As people go out into public places and carry out their daily activities, ambient noises can interfere with regular app programs. ambient coughs include real authentic coughs and the fake ones coming from other people around the app user.
Distinguishing Between Coughs
Coughing might be a commonly known symptom, whether it is for getting rid of foreign irritants or clearing your throat of mucus. Most people don’t pay a lot of attention to this, but all coughs have different meanings.
Dry Cough
It is a cough that doesn’t bring up any fluid such as phlegm and mucus from your throat. Dry coughs sometimes give you a tickling sensation in the back of your throat and are usually caused by upper respiratory infections like the flu or a cold.Â
Wet Cough
These are the ones that often bring up mucus and are also caused by having the flu, a cold, asthma, acute bronchitis, or pneumonia. They can also be accompanied by other symptoms such as fatigue, runny nose, and postnasal drip.
Having a wet cough means you will be feeling the sensation as if something is dripping or stuck in your chest or at the back of your throat.
Paroxysmal Cough
Paroxysmal coughs are coughs with sporadic attacks of uncontrollable and violent coughing fits. Paroxysmal coughs are rather exhausting and unpleasant. The patient will be struggling to catch their breath and can even vomit.
Pertussis, also known as whooping cough, is a respiratory infection that triggers violent coughing. During the cough attack, the lungs are forced to release all the air inside them, causing the patient to inhale violently while making a “whoop” sound.
Croup Cough
Not your typical cough, croup cough is a viral infection and only happens to children aged five or younger.
Croup coughs cause the upper airways to swell and become irritated. As young children typically have undeveloped and narrow airways, they become even smaller when it swells up, which makes it hard to breathe.
GERD Cough
It occurs when some of your stomach acids come up the esophagus. This disorder can occur rarely or persistently, depending on the seriousness of the disease. The acid in the esophagus can cause heartburn and other symptoms, as well as potential tissue damage.
Why Is Tracking Ambient Coughs Important?
While a surgeon or a doctor’s image may be the first thing coming to mind when you think about the healthcare industry, an enormous amount of it is also happening behind the scenes. For instance, data and information are just as important as doctors, surgeons, or other medical workers.
In the medical field, accurate information does not only help the doctors to get a more precise diagnosis of their patients but can also be a lot more efficient and productive. Instead of testing themselves on their patients to get the health data they need, having the necessary information collected upfront is very useful.
The value of ambient cough: There are plenty of initiatives and projects trying to collect real-world coughs as a way to train AI. However, most of these are collecting “elicited” coughs, which means you can go to a website and download an app, press record, and “fake” a cough.
Therefore, it makes it challenging for the AI to learn which cough is authentic and which ones are fakes. However, there is an enormous difference between such a real and an elicited cough, which medical professionals can use to develop their AI.
Coughing may be a common symptom for various diseases, but knowing which kind of cough can help the patient to be diagnosed with the right health condition in a shorter time. The duration, the frequency, the trend, all of it can help doctors with their work and help the patient to have better treatment. That’s why keeping track of the ambient coughs is essential, especially during this time of the pandemic.
Hyfe uses artificial intelligence to identify coughs. It counts every cough and allows you to compare and track your coughing over time. This gives you objective insights into your coughing and can help you monitor your health in the context of pollution, asthma, or even COVID-19. Stay on top of your health by tracking your cough with Hyfe.
Let us know what you have learned after reading this article. Have you tried health tracking apps? What was your experience? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!
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