“Coughing serves as an important biomarker for tracking a variety of conditions,” says Edgar Lobaton, corresponding author of a paper on the work and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University.

“For example, cough frequency can help us monitor the progress of respiratory diseases or predict when someone’s asthma condition is being exacerbated, and they may want to use their inhaler. That’s why there is interest in developing technologies that can detect and track cough frequency.”

The paper, “Robust Multimodal Cough Detection with Optimized Out-of-Distribution Detection for Wearables,” is published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.