Detection of COVID-19 from voice, cough and breathing patterns: Dataset and preliminary results.

COVID-19 heavily affects breathing and voice and causes symptoms that make patients' voices distinctive, creating recognizable audio signatures. Initial studies have already suggested the potential of using voice as a screening solution. In this article we present a dataset of voice, cough and breathing audio recordings collected from individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 virus, as well as non-infected subjects via large scale crowdsourced campaign. We describe preliminary results for detection of COVID-19 from cough patterns using standard acoustic features sets, wavelet scattering features and deep audio embeddings extracted from low-level feature representations (VGGish and OpenL3). Our models achieve accuracy of 88.52%, sensitivity of 88.75% and specificity of 90.87%, confirming the applicability of audio signatures to identify COVID-19 symptoms. We furthermore provide an in-depth analysis of the most informative acoustic features and try to elucidate the mechanisms that alter the acoustic characteristics of coughs of people with COVID-19.

Voice for Health: The Use of Vocal Biomarkers from Research to Clinical Practice.

Diseases can affect organs such as the heart, lungs, brain, muscles, or vocal folds, which can then alter an individual's voice. Therefore, voice analysis using artificial intelligence opens new opportunities for healthcare. From using vocal biomarkers for diagnosis, risk prediction, and remote monitoring of various clinical outcomes and symptoms, we offer in this review an overview of the various applications of voice for health-related purposes. We discuss the potential of this rapidly evolving environment from a research, patient, and clinical perspective. We also discuss the key challenges to overcome in the near future for a substantial and efficient use of voice in healthcare.