Publication
Counting the number of times a patient coughs per day is an essential biomarker in determining treatment efficacy for novel antitussive therapies and personalizing patient care. Automatic cough counting tools must provide accurate information, while running on a lightweight, portable device that protects the patient’s privacy. Several devices and algorithms have been developed for cough counting, but many use only error-prone audio signals, rely on offline processing that compromises data privacy, or utilize processing and memory-intensive neural networks that require more hardware resources than can fit on a wearable device. Therefore, there is a need for wearable devices that employ multimodal sensors to perform accurate, privacy-preserving, automatic cough counting algorithms directly on the device in an edge Artificial Intelligence (edge-AI) fashion. To advance this research field, we contribute the first publicly accessible cough counting dataset of multimodal biosignals. The database contains nearly 4 hours of biosignal data, with both acoustic and kinematic modalities, covering 4,300 annotated cough events from 15 subjects. Furthermore, a variety of non-cough sounds and motion scenarios mimicking daily life activities are also present, which the research community can use to accelerate machine learning (ML) algorithm development. A technical validation of the dataset reveals that it represents a wide variety of signal-to- noise ratios, which can be expected in a real-life use case, as well as consistency across experimental trials. Finally, to demonstrate the usability of the dataset, we train a simple cough vs non-cough signal classifier that obtains a 91% sensitivity, 92% specificity, and 80% precision on unseen test subject data. Such edge-friendly AI algorithms have the potential to provide continuous ambulatory monitoring of the numerous chronic cough patients.