Coswara -- A Database of Breathing, Cough, and Voice Sounds for COVID-19 Diagnosis

TL;DR

This paper introduces Coswara, an open-access database of respiratory sounds collected globally, aiming to enable machine learning-based COVID-19 diagnosis as a scalable, cost-effective alternative to RT-PCR testing.

Contribution

It presents the creation and initial analysis of a large, crowdsourced respiratory sound dataset for COVID-19 detection, which is a novel resource for research in sound-based diagnostics.

Findings

Dataset includes cough, breath, and voice sounds from diverse participants.

Open access dataset facilitates research and development of diagnostic tools.

Initial analysis shows potential for machine learning models to identify COVID-19 related sounds.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic presents global challenges transcending boundaries of country, race, religion, and economy. The current gold standard method for COVID-19 detection is the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing. However, this method is expensive, time-consuming, and violates social distancing. Also, as the pandemic is expected to stay for a while, there is a need for an alternate diagnosis tool which overcomes these limitations, and is deployable at a large scale. The prominent symptoms of COVID-19 include cough and breathing difficulties. We foresee that respiratory sounds, when analyzed using machine learning techniques, can provide useful insights, enabling the design of a diagnostic tool. Towards this, the paper presents an early effort in creating (and analyzing) a database, called Coswara, of respiratory sounds, namely, cough, breath, and voice. The sound samples are collected via worldwide crowdsourcing using a website application. The curated dataset is released as open access. As the pandemic is evolving, the data collection and analysis is a work in progress. We believe that insights from analysis of Coswara can be effective in enabling sound based technology solutions for point-of-care diagnosis of respiratory infection, and in the near future this can help to diagnose COVID-19.