To advance the field of automatic cough counting and enable a fair comparison of different algorithms, we contribute the first publicly accessible, finely-labeled cough biosignal dataset. The public dataset contains 227 minutes of biosignals and nearly 4,300 annotated cough events.
Data access#
The dataset can be downloaded from this Zenodo database.
Data collection#
Signals#
The dataset contains biosignals collected using a nocel lightweight, battery-powered device containing the following sensors:
- Acoustic - two microphones - one facing toward the body and one facing away from it - each sampled at 16 kHz
- Kinematic - an interial measurement unit - containing accelerometer and gyroscope signals - sampled at 100 Hz
Subjects#
Recordings were collected from 15 healthy subjects (10 male, 10 female; age 26.5 ± 6.5 years; body mass index (BMI) 22.6 ± 4.5 kilograms per square meter). Institutional review board approval was obtained (HREC No.: 085-2022) and all participants signed an informed consent prior to data acquisition.
Non-cough sounds#
In addition to coughs, the subjects produced the following sounds that could possibly be confused with coughing:
- Laughing
- Throat clearing
- Deep breathing
Environmental noise#
To assess how well classifiers perform under real-life noise conditions, several noise factors were intentionally added to the experimental setup. These noises came in the form of audio and kinematic noise.
Audio noise:
- Traffic
- Music
- Bystander cough
Kinematic noise:
- Walking
Dataset structure#
The files are arranged in a hierarchical structure as shown in the figure below. For each experimental condition, there are three to four corresponding files: .wav audio files for the body-facing and outward-facing microphones, a .csv file for the IMU data, and in the case of cough recordings, a .json file containing the cough location annotations. The gender and BMI of each subject are recorded in the biodata.json file.
Subject ID/
├── Trial 1/
│ ├── Sit/
│ │ ├── No noise
| | | ├── Cough
│ │ | | ├── body-facing-mic.wav
│ │ | | ├── outward-facing-mic.wav
│ │ | | ├── imu.csv
│ │ | | └── ground-truth.json
| | | ├── Laugh
│ │ | | ├── ...
| | | ├── Deep breathing
│ │ | | ├── ...
| | | └── Throat clearing
│ │ | ├── ...
| | ├── Traffic
│ │ | ├── ...
| | ├── Music
│ │ | ├── ...
| | ├── Bystander cough
│ │ | ├── ...
│ ├── Walk
│ │ ├── ...
| ├── biodata.json
| ...