COVID-19 and Computer Audition: An Overview on What Speech & Sound Analysis Could Contribute in the SARS-CoV-2 Corona Crisis

Frontiers in Digital Health

Xiao Li²  Huaiyuan Zheng³  Björn W. Schuller⁴  Juan Liu⁵  Dagmar M. Schuller⁷  Kun Qian⁷ 

[1] Music, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom;Department of Hand Surgery, Wuhan Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China;Department of Plastic Surgery, The Central Hospital of Wuhan, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China;EIHW – Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany;Educational Physiology Laboratory, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;;GLAM – Group on Language, Audio &audEERING GmbH, Gilching, Germany;

关键词: corona virus;    SARS-CoV-2;    COVID-19;    computer audition;    machine listening;    computational paralinguistics;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fdgth.2021.564906

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

At the time of writing this article, the world population is suffering from more than 2 million registered COVID-19 disease epidemic-induced deaths since the outbreak of the corona virus, which is now officially known as SARS-CoV-2. However, tremendous efforts have been made worldwide to counter-steer and control the epidemic by now labelled as pandemic. In this contribution, we provide an overview on the potential for computer audition (CA), i.e., the usage of speech and sound analysis by artificial intelligence to help in this scenario. We first survey which types of related or contextually significant phenomena can be automatically assessed from speech or sound. These include the automatic recognition and monitoring of COVID-19 directly or its symptoms such as breathing, dry, and wet coughing or sneezing sounds, speech under cold, eating behaviour, sleepiness, or pain to name but a few. Then, we consider potential use-cases for exploitation. These include risk assessment and diagnosis based on symptom histograms and their development over time, as well as monitoring of spread, social distancing and its effects, treatment and recovery, and patient well-being. We quickly guide further through challenges that need to be faced for real-life usage and limitations also in comparison with non-audio solutions. We come to the conclusion that CA appears ready for implementation of (pre-)diagnosis and monitoring tools, and more generally provides rich and significant, yet so far untapped potential in the fight against COVID-19 spread.

【 授权许可】

Unknown