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 this article, the world population is suffering from more than 2 million registered COVID-19 disease epidemic-induced deaths since the outbreak of the corona virus, which is now officially known as SARS-CoV-2. However, 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 COVID-19 directly or its symptoms such as 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 well-being. We quickly guide further through challenges that need to be faced for real-life usage and limitations also in comparison with non-audio solutions. 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.

Capabilities of computer analysis of breath sounds in patients with COVID-19

“…Обзор [17] посвящен возможности ком пьютерного прослушивания, т.е. использова нию речи и звукового анализа искусствен ным интеллектом в диагностике COVID 19.…”

The Promise of AI in Detection, Diagnosis, and Epidemiology for Combating COVID-19: Beyond the Hype

“…In Schuller et al (2020), presented a potential computer audition tool that uses AI-based speech and sound analysis to COVID-19 diagnosis. The authors surveyed automatic recognition and monitoring of contextually significant phenomena from speech or sound, such as dry and wet coughing or sneezing sounds, pain, speech under cold, and breathing for diagnostic exploitation using AI techniques such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) (Pascual et al, 2017).…”

Leveraging Data Science to Combat COVID-19: A Comprehensive Review

“…Hence, audio analysis is a potential means for lightweight diagnosis. There is work performing diagnosis with respiratory and lung sound analysis [153], using low-cost smartphones [154]. High mortality risk groups can also be continuously monitored using speech analysis [155].…”

“…The patterns of coughs [156], [157], sneezing [156], throat clearing and swallowing [158] can all be analysed using speech processing. At present, COVID-19 speech data has limited availability, although the potential benefits are highlighted in [153]. Thus, mobile apps like COVID-19 Sounds attempt to collect large audio datasets.…”