CoughLoc: Location-Aware Indoor Acoustic Sensing for Non-Intrusive Cough Detection

Pervasive medical monitoring has become an ideal alternative to nursing care for elderly people and patients in hospitals. Existing systems using single body-worn sensors are often intrusive and less reliable. By contrast, ubiquitous acoustic sensing techniques can support non-intrusive and robust medical monitoring. In this paper, we describe CoughLoc, a ubiquitous acoustic sensing system for continuous cough detection using a wireless sensor network. We show how knowledge of sound source locations can be leveraged to improve the detection accuracy of sound events caused by mobile users. Experiments in indoor environments show our system achieves over 90% cough detection performance under quiet backgrounds, and 1.6 times higher performance compared to a baseline approach with no location information.