Empowerment of Smartphones for Non-Invasive Ambulatory Cough Monitoring of Tuberculosis Patients During the Treatment

Early detection of Multidrug-resistant TB can save lives. However, laboratory resources for treatment monitoring are not available in many low-resource environments. Studies have shown that cough frequency changes in patients receiving effective TB treatment but remains unchanged in patients with MDR-TB. Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria is developing software and hardware that enables a smartphone to record and count coughs during first-line tuberculosis (TB) treatment, offering a way to measure the effectiveness of treatment and to identify MDR-TB cases.