53
Research Trials
20
Peer-reviewed publications
16
Clinical Conditions
This narrative review by Hyfe's R&D team makes the case that continuous cough monitoring (CCM), powered by acoustic AI, transforms cough from a subjective symptom into a quantifiable digital biomarker.
Authored by Hyfe's R&D team, this review synthesizes work presented at the European Respiratory Society Congress 2025 and argues that objective cough monitoring has crossed a practical threshold, moving from experimental technique to deployable clinical endpoint.
At CHEST 2025, held in Chicago, Illinois, Laurie Slovarp, PhD, CCC-SLP, professor at the University of Montana and certified speech pathologist, presented a poster on the development of a digital therapeutic designed to improve access to behavioral cough suppression therapy for patients with refractory chronic cough.
This study asked whether the core components of BCST could be embedded in a digital therapeutic and paired with continuous, objective cough monitoring inside the CoughPro app.
21.10.2025
An estimated 7 million adults in the United States live with refractory or unexplained chronic cough, a condition for which no FDA-approved drug therapy exists. Behavioral cough suppression therapy (BCST), delivered by specialty-trained speech-language pathologists, is the most efficacious treatment available, yet the specialist workforce needed to deliver it at scale does not. This study asked whether the core components of BCST could be embedded in a digital therapeutic and paired with continuous, objective cough monitoring inside the CoughPro app.
Ten adults with refractory chronic cough completed a four-week intervention combining education on cough hypersensitivity syndrome with instruction in cough suppression techniques, delivered via text and video modules within the app. Cough rate and cough bout rate were measured continuously for seven days at baseline and across the treatment period; the Leicester Cough Questionnaire (LCQ) was administered pre- and post-treatment.
By week four, mean hourly cough rate had fallen by 41.8% and mean bout rate by 41.5%. Eight of ten participants (80%) achieved a clinically meaningful improvement on the LCQ, with the pre-to-post change reaching statistical significance and a large effect size (p = .009, r = 0.79).
The findings offer the first proof-of-concept that an app-delivered digital therapeutic, pairing behavioral cough suppression with passive, continuous cough monitoring, can approximate outcomes previously achievable only through specialist-led in-person care. The results warrant evaluation in a controlled clinical trial and support the continued development of a prescription digital therapeutic for chronic cough.
