All of us at QuickLogic and SensiML hope that you and your families are doing well during these challenging times. Like most of you, my wife and I have been working from home for many weeks now, and my children have been participating in distance learning, so I am sympathetic to how the pandemic has upset our collective attempt to balance work and family.

For those on the front lines, we’d like to reiterate our deep respect and gratitude for the important work you have been doing. For the rest of us, other than following the recommended social distancing protocols, unfortunately, there has been very little we can do to help. However, that has recently changed as we all now have the opportunity to do something beneficial for society and our business at the same time – a sometimes rare occurrence.

Many of you have often asked me what SensiML technology is capable of. One of the strongest values of the SensiML AutoML technology is that it enables the non-data scientist to take existing datasets and quickly/easily create AI models that can then be used to identify similar patterns in new datasets. These datasets are created from various electronic data sources, such as temperature sensors, accelerometers, digital cameras, and microphones.

There is research now that suggests one can use the sound data captured by microphones commonly used in laptops, smartphones, wearables, etc. to detect a cough and to predict whether the cough is the dry-type cough symptomatic of a COVID-19 infection. We believe that the SensiML toolkit may be able to create a non-clinical level model that could help in this fight against COVID-19, and we need datasets to prove this hypothesis. This is where all of us can help.

Here is my request of you. If you are comfortable, please go to the following webpage and submit your cough data (even if you don’t have an involuntary cough right now, a voluntary is just as good for these purposes), and any other information from the questionnaire you are comfortable providing. Your cough and questionnaire data is completely anonymous and we won’t know who submitted what. Any cough data is helpful (even if you are completely healthy), and will enable us to start building a detector and a classifier.

As I wrote earlier, this initiative is much bigger and more important than a business opportunity – it is about being able to assist people in getting the information they need to know whether they should call their doctor or not, and at the same time help hospitals, doctors and nurses from getting overwhelmed with patients who don’t necessarily need to be there. It is about assisting companies and communities easing back into a life without sheltering-in-place with confidence that people can understand symptoms before they become a problem.

This crowdsourcing project and resulting SensiML AI model is not intended to be a clinical-level diagnosis for whether or not you have an active COVID-19 infection; if you think you might we strongly encourage you to consult your health care professional. Instead, your contribution will help us build a tool that could prove extremely useful for society in the future. Please help us at the following link if you are willing, and feel free to share it with your coworkers, family, and friends as well.

https://sensiml.com/covid-19-project

Thank you and we wish you and your family and friends good health and well-being.