[freebeard]

theregister.co.uk: Just cough into here, please: Cambridge-developed app slurps the sounds of COVID-19
No stethoscope needed – but you don't get to know the results

A team at the UK's Cambridge University has created an application to collect the speaking, breathing and coughing sounds of participants in the hope of building predictive models to "contribute to the early diagnosis of COVID-19".

Development has been led by Professor Cecilia Mascolo from the university's Department of Computer Science and Technology... Mascolo said: "Having spoken to doctors, one of the most common things they have noticed about patients with the virus is the way they catch their breath when they're speaking, as well as a dry cough, and the intervals of their breathing patterns. There are very few large datasets of respiratory sounds, so to make better algorithms that could be used for early detection, we need as many samples from as many participants as we can get. Even if we don't get many positive cases of coronavirus, we could find links with other health conditions."

The Reg being The Reg:

You will not learn anything directly from the app. "The app won't offer any medical advice and it only collects data for research," says the privacy policy, which also assures us: "We will not collect identifiers which allow us to identify the user."

Those good intentions are potentially undermined by the use of Google's reCAPTCHA service, used to deter bots from recording their coughs, which means that the app also requires you to agree to Google's privacy policy and Google's terms of service. Needless to say, this policy is not anything specific to reCAPTCHA but the main massive and all-embracing Google affair, and there is no clarity about what happens to the data which it gathers.

Provided you can live with that, the researchers say that they need many participants so maybe it is time to cough up. ®