Monitoring chronic cough: current and future techniques

Abstract

Coughing produces a characteristic sound that is readily recognized by the human ear and provides the opportunity to objectively quantify coughing through acoustic recordings. The development of digital recording technologies has facilitated such recordings over the extended time periods needed to capture symptom episodes. However, the manual counting of coughs by listening to long recordings is time-consuming, laborious and restricts usage to research studies. This article outlines the challenges in recording, analyzing and quantifying cough sounds and describes the systems under development. Progress is being made towards automated algorithms to identify and count cough sounds; however, current systems have only been tested over short time periods and in limited patient groups. Further work is required to achieve broadly applicable accurate cough monitoring systems.

Keywords::

• acoustics
• anti-tussives
• chronic cough
• cough monitoring
• cough reflex
• cough sounds

Financial & competing interests disclosure

Jaclyn Smith is funded by an MRC Clinician Scientist Award and is an inventor on a patent describing a novel method for cough detection, filed by the University Hospital of South Manchester and licensed to Vitalograph Ltd, UK. She has an industrial collaboration with Vitalograph Ltd, UK, to develop a commercial cough monitoring system. The author has no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.