Cloudsoft, a Scottish managed services provider, supports a UK government trial a Covid-19 test that can detect COVID-19 using only voice data.
Dubbed ‘cough-in-a-box,’ the application uses artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose Covid-19 through audio recordings of a user coughing directly into their smartphone’s microphone.
Analysing more than 70,000 recordings submitted by volunteers, which included around 2,500 from people confirmed to have Covid-19, researchers from MIT trained the AI model to correctly identify 98.5 percent of positive cases, including 100 percent of asymptomatic patients.
Since December 2020, a team of Cloudsoft engineers have been working with specialists from Fujitsu, Formwize and the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) to convert the application to the cloud. The UK government has scaled the application for 40,000 further trials and ensured it meets the strict demands for data processing and security due to the need to anonymise personal voice data and combine it with participant’s medical history and PCR test data across the UK.
The application combines cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to increase resilience and reliability, which are critical requirements for the future use of the project as the UK government expands its ongoing trials.
Ross Gray, CEO, Cloudsoft said: “This is a transformational technology for the greater human good and we’re proud to at the forefront of technological innovation to contribute to overcoming COVID-19. With so many applications in the real world, this technology could be a game-changer for so many sectors – including travel and hospitality, providing the current trials continue to show the same level of effectiveness as the initial MIT study.”
