Pfizer has developed a smartphone app which will tell users if they have Covid-19. The app records the sound of a persons cough and artificial intelligence determines whether the cough is due to Covid.
According to The Times:
After a preliminary clinical trial, the creators said it accurately picked up more than 90 per cent of infections just by looking for a signature in the cough.
Last week Pfizer, the American pharmaceutical giant, offered the equivalent of £57 million to buy the small Australian developer, ResApp, which has trained an algorithm on a database of 6,000 coughs and has already developed its software for use on other respiratory diseases.
Its owners, who are based in Brisbane, hope to make the app available to the public soon, although it has yet to be fully validated.
Doctors in Australia, Indonesia and Switzerland are using a version of the app to help diagnose common respiratory conditions such as asthma and pneumonia during appointments carried out remotely.
ResApp researchers have confirmed that the technology could also be used to detect Covid-19 if a patient coughed five times into a smartphone microphone.
A study involving 741 volunteers, more than half of whom were infected, showed that the app had a 92 per cent success rate in diagnosing the disease if people were infected.
“That’s the big breakthrough that we’ve made over the last couple months,” Dr Tony Keating, ResApp’s chief executive, said.
“We’ve been able to match coughs down to positive Covid-19 results. So we’ve found signatures in cough sounds that give us an indication of Covid.”
Earlier this month, the UK government brought an end to free covid testing for most of the population. This was seen as a positive by many independent content creators, the idea being that when healthy people ceased testing themselves, that would be the end of the scam.
Maybe not. If the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) signs off on one of these apps, people will continue to absent themselves from work, even when they feel perfectly fine. That might prove to be chaotic this coming Winter.
And imagine, when queuing to get into a theatre or a music venue, you’re asked to produce a QR code, one generated by your own phone, to prove that you coughed into it earlier that day, and are safe to enter?
We’re here now.
