COVID-19 and Computer Audition: An Overview on What Speech & Sound Analysis Could Contribute in the SARS-CoV-2 Corona Crisis

Abstract

At the time of writing, the world population is suffering from more than 10 000 registered COVID-19 disease epidemic induced deaths since the outbreak of the Corona virus more than three months ago now officially known as SARS-CoV-2. Since, tremendous efforts have been made worldwide to counter-steer and control the epidemic by now labelled as pandemic. In this contribution, we provide an overview on the potential for computer audition (CA), i. e., the usage of speech and sound analysis by artificial intelligence to help in this scenario. We first survey which types of related or contextually significant phenomena can be automatically assessed from speech or sound. These include the automatic recognition and monitoring of breathing, dry and wet coughing or sneezing sounds, speech under cold, eating behaviour, sleepiness, or pain to name but a few. Then, we consider potential use-cases for exploitation. These include risk assessment and diagnosis based on symptom histograms and their development over time, as well as monitoring of spread, social distancing and its effects, treatment and recovery, and patient wellbeing. We quickly guide further through challenges that need to be faced for real-life usage. We come to the conclusion that CA appears ready for implementation of (pre-)diagnosis and monitoring tools, and more generally provides rich and significant, yet so far untapped potential in the fight against COVID-19 spread.

Exploring Automatic COVID-19 Diagnosis via Voice and Symptoms from Crowdsourced Data

“…With the advent of COVID-19, researchers have started to explore if respiratory sounds could be diagnostic [5]. For instance, in [4], breathing and cough sounds have been targeted and researchers demonstrate that COVID-19 individuals are distinguishable from healthy controls as well as asthmatic patients.…”

“…Nowadays, in addition to developing drugs and vaccines for treatment and protection [1,2], scientists and researchers are also investigating primary screening tools that ideally should be accurate, cost-effective, rapid, and meanwhile easily accessible to the mass at large. Amongst the efforts towards rapid screening [3,4], audiobased diagnosis appears promising, mainly due to its non-invasive and ubiquitous character, which would allow for individual prescreening 'anywhere', 'anytime', in real-time, and available to 'anyone' [5]. Many applications have been developed for monitoring health and wellbeing in recent times via intelligent speech and sound analysis [6,7,8].…”

An Early Study on Intelligent Analysis of Speech Under COVID-19: Severity, Sleep Quality, Fatigue, and Anxiety

“…As a consequence, the patients were approximately grouped into three categories, i. e., the high-severity stage for the first 25 days, the mid-severity stage between 25 and 50 days, and the low-severity stage after 50 days. Besides, further three classification tasks considered in this study are to predict the self-reported sleep quality, fatigue, and anxiety levels of COVID-19 patients, the potential of which has been spotted in [14].…”

“…In addition, there could be many meaningful and powerful audio-based tools and applications, which are so far underestimated, and hence underutilised. Pretty recently, scientists elaborated several potential use-cases in the fight against COVID-19 spread via exploiting intelligent speech and sound analysis [14]. Specifically, these envisioned directions are grouped into three categories, i. e., audio-based risk assessment, audio-based diagnosis, and audio-based monitors such as for monitoring of spread, social distancing, treatment and recovery, and patient wellbeing [14].…”

An Overview on Audio, Signal, Speech, & Language Processing for COVID-19

“…This not only demands for reaching out to a larger population in shorter time, but also to come up with effective solutions at each stage of the pathological, psychological, and behavioural problems. For the diagnosis purpose, the world health organisation (WHO) 1 has described the COVID-19 key symptoms as high temperature, coughing, and breathing difficulties, and an expanded list of symptoms that includes chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat, and a new loss of taste or smell. These expanded list of symptoms are found to appear after 2-14 days of the onset of virus.…”