Neural network based algorithm for automatic identification of cough sounds

Cough is the most common symptom of the several respiratory diseases containing diagnostic information. It is the best suitable candidate to develop a simplified screening technique for the management of respiratory diseases in timely manner, both in developing and developed countries, particularly in remote areas where medical facilities are limited. However, major issue hindering the development is the non-availability of reliable technique to automatically identify cough events. Medical practitioners still rely on manual counting, which is laborious and time consuming. In this paper we propose a novel method, based on the neural network to automatically identify cough segments, discarding other sounds such a speech, ambient noise etc. We achieved the accuracy of 98% in classifying 13395 segments into two classes, ‘cough’ and ‘other sounds’, with the sensitivity of 93.44% and specificity of 94.52%. Our preliminary results indicate that method can develop into a real-time cough identification technique in continuous cough monitoring systems.