Devices
Cough Listener
A small box for clinic waiting rooms that picks out coughs from background noise and suggests who may need TB or pneumonia screening.
Who it is for
Waiting rooms at district hospitals and commune health stations, where a persistent cough is often the first sign that goes unchecked.
How it works
- Listen to the room
- Detect a cough
- Separate from speech
- Classify on chip
- Suggest screening
In detail
The device listens for cough events, separates each cough from speech and room noise using the same source-separation approach as the stethoscope, and classifies the cough’s acoustic pattern on the chip. When a pattern looks concerning it lights up and suggests a referral for screening. Only a short anonymous summary is kept; no conversation is recorded.
My part
- Designing the cough detection and separation pipeline to fit on a microcontroller.
- Reusing the three-source separation work from SPMamba and MossFormer 2.
- Privacy by design: no raw audio or speech is stored.
Status note In development. A screening aid only; it does not diagnose tuberculosis or pneumonia.