Discrimination of productive and non-productive cough by sound analysis

There are two types of coughs, productive and non-productive; the former is caused by excess airway secretions. The analysis of cough may provide important clues not only to aid diagnosis, but also for the selection of drugs for treatment. In this study, cough sounds recorded in a free acoustic field from patients with productive cough and non-productive cough due to chronic airway diseases were compared with those of voluntary cough of healthy subjects and were analyzed by sound spectrogram and time-expanded waveform. All cough sounds could be separated into two or three phases. The implementation of the novel technique to record cough sounds in the free acoustic field and to analyze the sounds of the high frequency range enable recognition of the characteristics of the cough sounds in phase 2 of the cough.