Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have found that people who are asymptomatic for Covid-19 may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough, which can be captured by artificial intelligence. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed an artificial intelligence model that differentiates between asymptomatic people infected with Covid-19 and healthy individuals via forced-cough recordings submitted through Web browsers, cellphones, and laptops. The MIT team trained the model on cough samples and spoken words; it accurately identified 98.5% of coughs from people confirmed to have the virus (100% from those who are asymptomatic) when fed new cough recordings. The researchers are incorporating the model into a user-friendly application which could potentially be a free, convenient, noninvasive prescreening tool to identify asymptomatic people infected with the virus. Users could log in daily, cough into their handset, and instantly receive information on whether they might be infected and confirm with a formal test.

Asymptomatic people who are infected with Covid-19 exhibit, by definition, no discernible physical symptoms of the disease. They are thus less likely to seek out testing for the virus, and could unknowingly spread the infection to others. But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear.