COUGHTRIGGER: EARBUDS IMU BASED COUGH DETECTION ACTIVATOR USING AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT SENSITIVITY-PRIORITIZED TIME SERIES CLASSIFIER

Persistent coughs are a major symptom of respiratory-related diseases. Increasing research attention has been paid to detecting coughs using wearables. Among all types of sensors utilized, microphone is most widely used to detect coughs. However, the intense power consumption needed to process audio signals prevents acoustic sensors from being continuously powered on battery-limited commercial wearable products, such as earbuds. In this work, we present CoughTrigger, which utilizes a lower-power sensor, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), in earbuds as a cough detection activator to trigger a higher-power sensor for audio processing and classification. It is able to run all-the-time as a standby service with minimal battery consumption and trigger the audio-based cough detection when a candidate cough is detected from the IMU. Besides, the use of IMU brings the benefit of improved specificity of cough detection. Experiments are conducted on 45 subjects and achieved 90% sensitivity and 60% specificity for cough detection activation.