On Detecting Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Cough using Audio Signals Recorded from Smart-Phones

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a lung disease that makes breathing a strenuous task with chronic cough. Millions of adults, worldwide, suffer from COPD, and in many cases, they are not diagnosed at all. In this paper, we present the feasibility of leveraging cough samples recorded using a smart-phone’s microphone, and processing the associated audio signals via machine learning algorithms, to detect cough patterns indicative of COPD. Using 39 adult cough samples evenly spread across both genders, that included 23 subjects infected with COPD and 16 Controls, not infected with COPD, our system, using Random Forest classification techniques, yielded a detection accuracy of 85.4% with very good Precision, Recall and FMeasures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that designs a smart-phone based learning technique for detecting COPD via processing cough.