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Do you cough a lot?
Does someone you know cough a lot?
What if you could actually measure it, continuously?
For people with chronic cough, those question matters.
Because right now, most of what we know about cough comes from self-report. And that’s not very precise.
In this episode, Dr. Eeks speaks with Dr. Peter Small from Hyfe, a company using AI to continuously detect and count coughs, turning a common but poorly measured symptom into something objective. Hyfe is the FIRST company to create a tool to continuously monitor coughing.
Their technology processes sound in real time and records cough events without storing audio, allowing for long-term, privacy-preserving monitoring.
Hyfe is part of a growing field called acoustic epidemiology, which uses body sounds, like coughs, to better understand health and disease patterns.
We talk about:
- what a cough actually is, and how you define and quantify it
- how many people struggle with chronic cough
- what “continuous cough monitoring” looks like in real life
- bad coughs vs good coughs
- how Hyfe measures cough
- why measuring cough is useful for people who want to monitor their health more closely
- and whether cough monitoring and patterns could eventually be used for public health surveillance
We also discuss cough suppression therapy (CST), a behavioral treatment often delivered by speech-language pathologists, which has been shown to significantly reduce symptoms in many patients with chronic cough. Hyfe plans to offer it as a digital therapy folks can access from home.
Dr. Peter Small is the Chief Medical Officer of Hyfe, where he focuses on using acoustic AI to improve human health. An infectious disease specialist, he has spent his career developing global health solutions, with a particular focus on tuberculosis. His work has spanned Stanford University, the Gates Foundation—where he led major TB initiatives—and global programs in India, Madagascar, and Nepal, using technology to expand access to care.
Work with me? Perhaps we are a good match.
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