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The Cough Doctor
Plus: getting in shape when you have back or joint problems
The 10almonds Team
April 04, 2023
Thought for the Day: What matters in life is what you care about, and what you will continue making an effort to care about
⏰ IN A RUSH?
Today’s Key Learnings:
Flying by? Here are some key take-away ideas from today’s newsletter:
Time-blocking, theme days, and a once-a-week planning session are tried-and-tested productivity boosters (see today’s video for more details)
Dr. Peter Small, CMO of Hyfe (a medical AI company) wants YOUR coughs
Seriously though, it’s a smartphone-driven public health research project
It also offers health benefits to individual users, by analysing your cough sounds and cough patterns, comparing them with hundreds of millions of others, and potentially identifying diseases that human doctors could overlook or take much longer to identify.
Some may consider it a privacy minefield though, so caveat tussor.
Scott Hogan’s work offers relief for those who know “you musn’t train through an injury” but need to recover from some musculoskeletal problem in the first place. (See today’s One-Minute Book Review near the bottom)
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
5 ways to be 10x more productive?
Dan Martel, author of “Buy Back Your Time”, has the following to offer:
We’ll not keep them a mystery; they are…
😷 MAIN FEATURE
The Cough Doctor
This is Dr. Peter Small, who worked in epidemiology since the beginning of HIV epidemic. He became a pioneer in the field of molecular epidemiology. As such, his work was a guiding beacon for the public health response to the resurgence of tuberculosis. He’s travelled the world spending years in various institutions studying all manner of respiratory illnesses.... These have ranged from tuberculosis to pneumonia to lung cancer and (back to epidemiology) Covid-19.
He's now the Chief Medical Officer at...
Hyfe
Hyfe, a medical AI company, was founded in 2020. Its objective: to build acoustic tools for respiratory diagnostics and monitoring.
In other words: it records coughs and collects data about coughing.
❝It’s ironic how much people focus on counting steps while ignoring cough, which is far more consequential. Hyfe is a science-driven company with the technology to make cough count. Particularly now, with increased awareness of cough and the rapid growth of digital health driven by Covid-19, this technology can improve the lives of patients, the care provided by doctors, and the efficiency of health systems.❞
How does it do it?
Hyfe’s AI monitors the number of times a person coughs and the sound of the cough through any smartphone or other smart device.
This data collected over time provides increasingly more reliable information than a single visit to the doctor! By constantly listening and analyzing, it can detect patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.
How big is this "big data" effort?
Hyfe maintains the largest cough dataset in the world. This means it can compare the sound of a patient’s cough with more than 400 million cough-like sounds from 83 countries across all continents.
The human brain doesn't handle big numbers well. So, just to illustrate: if the average cough is 1 second long, that means it'd take more than 12 years to listen to them all.
Hyfe, meanwhile, can:
listen to many things simultaneously
index them all against user and location,
use its ever-growing neural net to detect and illustrate patterns.
It's so attentive, that it can learn to distinguish between different people's coughs in the same household.
❝Companies like Google Health see even basic information such as getting an accurate count of the number of times a person coughs a day as a useful resource, and part of a larger need to collect and chronicle more health information to refine the way doctors diagnose disease and manage treatments in the future.❞
What are the public health implications?
The most obvious application is to note when there's a spike in coughing, and see how such spikes grow and spread (if they do), to inform of contagion risks.
Another is to cross-reference it with data about local environmental allergens. Knowing how things like pollution and even pollen affect individuals differently could be helpful in identifying (and managing) chronic conditions like asthma.
What are the private health implications?
❝It’s going to transform the whole clinical approach for this common and chronic symptom. Patients will come in, have the data on how much they are coughing, and the physician can suggest a treatment based on that information to see if it makes the coughs better❞
Dr. Small's colleague Dr. Cai, speaking for Google Health on this project, sees even more utility for diagnostics:
❝When I was in medical school, never ever did they teach us that we could listen to somebody cough and identify whether that person has TB (tuberculosis), COPD, or a tumor. But I keep seeing more and more studies of people coughing into a microphone, and an algorithm can detect whether somebody has TB with 95% specificity and sensitivity, or if someone has pneumonia or an exacerbation of COPD❞
And the privacy implications?
Perhaps you don't quite fancy the idea of not being able to cough without Google knowing about it. Hyfe's software is currently opt-in, but...
If you cough near someone else's Hyfe app, their app will recognize you're not the app's user, and start building a profile for you. Of course, that won't be linked to your name, email address, or other IDs, as it would if you were the app's user.
Hyfe will ask to connect to your social media, to collect more information about you and your friends.
Whether you’d like to try this or perhaps you’re just curious to learn more about this fascinating project, you can check out:
💬 TWEET OF THE DAY
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
— Alex Blechman (@AlexBlechman)
10:49 PM • Nov 8, 2021
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Built from Broken - by Scott Hogan, CPT, COES
So many exercise programs come with the caveat "consult your doctor before engaging in any new activity", and the safe-but-simple "do not try to train through an injury".
Which is all very well and good for someone in fabulous health who sprained an ankle while running and can just wait a bit, but what about those of us carrying...
long-term injuries
recurring injuries
or just plain unfixable physical disabilities?
That's where physiotherapist Scott Hogan comes in. The subtitle line goes:
❝A Science-Based Guide to Healing Painful Joints, Preventing Injuries, and Rebuilding Your Body❞
...but he does also recognize that there are some things that won't bounce back.
On the other hand... There are a lot of things that get written off by doctors as "here's some ibuprofen" that, with consistent mindful training, could actually be fixed.
Hogan delivers again and again in this latter category! You'll see on Amazon that the book has thousands of 4- and 5-star ratings and many glowing reviews, and it's for a reason or three:
The book first lays a foundational knowledge of the most common injuries likely to impede us from training
It goes on to give step-by-step corrective exercises to guide your body through healing itself. Your body is trying to heal itself anyway; you might as well help it accomplish that!
It finishes up with a comprehensive (and essential) guide to train for the strength and mobility that will help you avoid future problems.
In short: a potentially life-changing book if you have some (likely back- or joint-related) problem that needs overcoming!
And if you don't? An excellent pre-emptive guide all the same. This is definitely one of those "an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure" things.
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May every day see progress in the things that matter to you,
The 10almonds Team