Hyfe, a cough monitoring smartphone app and digital diagnostics tool developed by an international team of scientists and public health professionals, is seeing its technology be incorporated into research in Spain in partnership with the University of Navarra, and involving over 800 participants. 

The study will introduce artificial intelligence technology and cough detection smartphone applications into epidemiological research for the first time. This methodology of digital cough monitoring for early detection of respiratory disease outbreaks at a community level has never been performed in research settings before. 

The trial is taking place in the city of Pamplona, Spain and the neighbouring municipalities of Cendea de Cizur and Zizur Mayor. Participants are monitoring their night time cough patterns using the Hyfe smartphone app. 

Hyfe’s partnership with the University of Navarra, Zizur’s Health Center and Montreal University Hospital Center (CHUM) is centred around identifying if the digital study of cough monitoring can predict the incidence of respiratory diseases and potentially, the appearance of future outbreaks. 

Hyfe is an artificial intelligence platform that detects and tracks coughs as they happen in real-time via a smartphone or wearable device. The company’s software platform encompasses machine learning algorithms to accurately detect cough and cough frequency in a precise fashion, before using acoustic analysis to help detect and diagnose respiratory illnesses. 

All participants taking part in the research trial fully consented to have their medical data reviewed periodically throughout the course of the trial. From this regular analysis, the incidence of respiratory or cough-associated diseases can be established.

Hyfe co-founder and CEO Joe Brew said: “COVID-19 has taught us that the old way of doing epidemic surveillance and monitoring is simply not good enough. For health systems to effectively stay ahead of rapidly changing realities, both at the patient level as well as the population level, we need to enlist novel methods, novel sensors, and novel approaches. The trial in Navarra is the first ever to implement the concept of “acoustic syndromic surveillance” in real-world settings. I’m confident we’ll look back on this as a pivotal moment in global health history.”