COVCOUGH: An Artificial Intelligence Application to Detect COVID-19 Patients through Smartphone-recorded Coughs

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected hundreds of millions of people in countries around the world. The number of new cases has reached 100,000 per day since the last wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam. It has become very apparent that the front-line employees are overworked. There are not enough PCR tests to keep up with the rate of the virus spreading in our community. In addition, the PCR test is expensive for the government, highly invasive, and time-consuming for patients, which discourages individuals from visiting the clinic for testing. Therefore, it is very necessary to have a quicker and simpler way of prescreening patients. This is the reason why the paper will introduce a new artificial intelligence application, named COVCOUGH, to early detect COVID-19 patients using cough sounds recorded by smartphones. During the recent peak of the epidemic in Vietnam, the COVCOUGH has been deployed and has more than 10,000 users.