The iBreath app collects data on coughs and other symptoms of lung disease. With the aid of artificial intelligence, the app can be used to automatically detect corona infection.
Download the iBreath app to your phone, record your cough, breathing, and a short voice sample, and answer a few questions about any other symptoms of the disease. This invitation, which applies equally to people who are healthy and ill, comes from a group of researchers at The Copenhagen Center for Health Technology (CACHET) at DTU. Their hope is that people all over the world will use the app.
“Initially, it’s simply a matter of collecting a lot of data,” says Jakob Bardram, Director of CACHET and Professor at DTU Health Tech.
“Data collection takes place completely anonymously—we don’t need to know who people are. We just ask for three audio samples and answers to a few questions about fever and other symptoms. Over the long term, we will then use artificial intelligence to teach the app to recognize different types of disease—e.g. Covid-19 so that it can notify the user if it thinks the person is infected.”
Together with a group of engineers, mathematicians, and doctors, Jakob Bardram is developing the CoronaMonitor app which more generally will be able to measure the body’s signals and help users to monitor their health. However, when he heard from a colleague at Cambridge University that a similar project was underway, the COVID-19 Sounds project, it was agreed to concentrate on an app specifically focused on data collection.
The iBreath app was developed with PhD student Devender Kumar and now the task for researchers is to get as many people around the world to use it so that the data base is large enough to create good machine learning algorithms.
Jakob Bardram stresses that iBreath is not an official app linked to the Danish Health Authority. However, if desired, it could eventually also be used as a form of cough monitoring that can give the authorities a picture of the geographical spread of corona disease.