The Ministry of Health wants you to record yourself coughing

You might not have heard of them, but the Digital Health Research and Innovation (DHRI) unit is a team within the Ministry of Health’s Institute for Clinical Research (ICR) that works to identify, address, explore and apply digital health solutions into the lives of Malaysians. Part of their latest work involves research into the coughing and breathing of Malaysians as we begin transitioning into the endemic phase of COVID-19.

The end goal is to develop an online-based COVID-19 screening tool. Essentially, it seems that by recording a large enough sample of coughing and breathing sounds from Malaysians who are healthy, are down with COVID-19 and have recovered from COVID-19, they can work to identify if there are any differences when coughing and breathing. They can then use the results to develop a tool that can automatically detect if your cough and breathing sounds more like a COVID-19 patient or not.

This study, officially titled ‘Research and development of a cough sound artificial intelligence (A.I.) for the detection of COVID 19‘, is being conducted by the DHRI, the ICR, the Ministry of Health and the Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak. They’re hoping for at least 2,400 participants for each type of disease so it’ll be great if you can help out by taking part in this study. There won’t be any monetary reward, but at least you can take pride in helping out researchers working towards a solution.

To take part, simply visit coughsound.dhri.my, where you’ll be greeted with a login screen. Simply enter your phone number and click on ‘First Time User’ to sign up and take part. You’ll then see a consent form pop up, showing you all the details about the study, including the names of the researchers involved. Once you agree to the consent form, you’ll be redirected to a quick questionnaire, where you will enter in details such as vaccination status, medical history (such as asthma, angina, diabetes and so forth) as well as your smoking history and if you’re showing any symptoms.

Once that’s done as well, you will be given a quick brief on how to set up your device prior to recording your cough and breathing. You’ll need a quiet room and a mask on hand as well as they want to record your cough and breathing with and without a mask on. Also, you will need to allow the website to have microphone access so that it can record audio; you can revoke microphone access once you’re done if you’re paranoid of course. Simply continue on with coughing and breathing for them, and when it’s all done you’ll be prompted to provide feedback for the study.

Again, you can visit coughsound.dhri.my to take part in this study.