Coughtrigger: Earbuds IMU Based Cough Detection Activator Using An Energy-Efficient Sensitivity-Prioritized Time Series Classifier
Open accessAbstract
Persistent coughs are a major symptom of respiratory-related diseases. Increasing research attention has been paid to detecting coughs using wearables, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Microphone is most widely used sensor to detect coughs. However, the intense power consumption needed to process audio hinders continuous audio-based cough detection on battery-limited commercial wearables, such as earbuds. We present CoughTrigger, which utilizes a lower-power sensor, inertial measurement unit (IMU), in earbuds as a cough detection activator to trigger a higher-power sensor for audio processing and classification. It runs all-the-time as a standby service with minimal battery consumption and triggers the audio-based cough detection when a candidate cough is detected from IMU. Besides, the use of IMU brings the benefit of improved specificity of cough detection. Experiments are conducted on 45 subjects and CoughTrigger achieved 0.77 AUC score. We also validated its effectiveness on free-living data and through on-device implementation.
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Some recent works use wearables to detect cough activity, a major symptom of pulmonary diseases.
“Some recent works use wearables to detect cough activity, a major symptom of pulmonary diseases [37,38,39,40].”
From Deep Learning in Human Activity Recognition with Wearable Sensors: A Review on Advances (2022) · cites this paper as [40]
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- Authors
- Zhang, S., Nemati, E., Dinh, M., Folkman, N., Ahmed, T., Rahman, M., Kuang, J., Alshurafa, N., & Gao, A.
- Affiliations
- Northwestern University (US)
- Samsung Research America,Mountain View,CA,USA
- Samsung Design Innovation Center,San Francisco,CA,USA
- Venue
- ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2022-05-23
- Pages
- 1-5
- ISSN
- 1520-6149 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3212191366
- Cited by
- 23
- References
- 15
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 6
- FWCI
- 1.99
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Context-Aware Activity Recognition Systems
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine › Phonocardiography and Auscultation Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › Non-Invasive Vital Sign Monitoring
- Keywords
- cough detection, earbuds, inertial measurement unit, energy-efficient sensing, sensor fusion, wearable devices, battery consumption, COVID-19 pandemic, respiratory diseases, time series classification
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