Performance of cough monitoring by Albus Home, a contactless and automated system for nocturnal respiratory monitoring at home

What is it about?

Worsening of night-time respiratory symptoms is clinically relevant across several respiratory conditions. In particular, nocturnal coughing and awakenings are associated with worsening states in conditions, such as asthma and COPD, and can be debilitating for patients and their partners suffering from chronic cough. Current methods of assessing cough in clinical care consist of symptom diaries and questionnaires that rely on patient or carer recall for the previous week or month. In clinical research, objective monitoring of cough frequency has become an important measure. However, current cough monitors are burdensome with wearable devices limited in use to a limited number of 24-hour recordings. In this work, we have presented a novel contactless bedside system for home respiratory monitoring, Albus Home, with the aim of testing the accuracy of the cough monitoring function in people with chronic respiratory conditions. By comparing against cough counts from human counters (“ground truths”), we showed that the Albus Home system had high accuracy in cough detection and very high agreement with the manual counts. We conclude that Albus Home is a contactless yet accurate system that enables nocturnal cough monitoring for as long as required without patients needing to do or wear anything.

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