HearCough: Enabling continuous cough event detection on edge computing hearables.

Cough event detection is the foundation of any measurement associated with cough, one of the primary symptoms of pulmonary illnesses. This paper proposes HearCough, which enables continuous cough event detection on edge computing hearables, by leveraging always-on active noise cancellation (ANC) microphones in commodity hearables. Specifically, we proposed a lightweight end-to-end neural network model - Tiny-COUNET and its transfer learning based traning method. When evaluated on our acted cough event dataset, Tiny-COUNET achieved equivalent detection performance but required significantly less computational resources and storage space than cutting-edge cough event detection methods. Then we implemented HearCough by quantifying and deploying the pre-trained Tiny-COUNET to a popular micro-controller in consumer hearables. Lastly, we evaluated that HearCough is effective and reliable for continuous cough event detection through a field study with 8 patients. HearCough achieved 2 Hz cough event detection with an accuracy of 90.0% and an F1-score of 89.5% by consuming an additional 5.2 mW power. We envision HearCough as a low-cost add-on for future hearables to enable continuous cough detection and pulmonary health monitoring.