Asking children to ‘just cough into this phone’ may help doctors determine whether a cough is related to asthma, croup or a lower respiratory infection. 

An Australian-developed smartphone app can diagnose asthma, croup, pneumonia, lower respiratory tract infections and bronchiolitis with up to 97% accuracy, a study has found.  

Using voice recognition technology familiar to Siri users, the automated cough analysis app has been trained to recognise the features of five different respiratory disease, say the researchers from Curtin University in Perth and the University of Queensland.

They tested the app by recording the coughs of 585 children aged up to 12, who were being cared for at two hospitals in WA.