Artificial Intelligence device uses coughing sounds to monitor flu, coronavirus trends
Coronavirus has been since December in China, the situation has turned grim in Europe and the US, and India is also seeing a rapid increase in infections. As the increasing trend of this virus, many people are developing instruments to identify the people who are infected, as if you are in group of people is difficult to identify which person is been effected and it slows passes on one to another like a chain.
Researchers of University of Massachusetts Amherst in US have developed a portable device powered by artificial intelligence (AI) which can detect coughing and crowd size in real time, and then analyze the data to directly monitor trends in flu-like illnesses such as Covid-19.
The AI device called as FluSense is envisioned for use in hospitals, and they said health surveillance tools used to forecast seasonal flu and other viral respiratory outbreaks, such as the Covid-19 pandemic or SARS. The Data provided from these devices is used to determine the timing for flu vaccine campaigns, potential travel restrictions, the allocation of medical supplies and more.
FluSense device provides a low-cost microphone array and thermal imaging data with a Raspberry Pi and neural computing engine. The researchers have analyzed more than 350,000 thermal images and 21 million non-speech audio samples from the public waiting areas and found that, they were able to accurately predict daily illness rates at the university clinic.
complementary and multiple sets of FluSense signals “strongly correlated” with laboratory-based testing for flu-like illnesses and influenza itself , according to scientists.
Finally researchers added, early symptom-related information captured by the device could provide valuable additional and complementary information to current influenza prediction efforts.
