The COVID-19 outbreak was announced as a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation in March 2020 and has affected a growing number of people in the past few weeks. In this context, advanced artificial intelligence techniques are brought to the fore in responding to fight against and reduce the impact of this global health crisis. In this study, we focus on developing some potential use-cases of intelligent speech analysis for COVID-19 diagnosed patients. In particular, by analysing speech recordings from these patients, we construct audio-onlybased models to automatically categorise the health state of patients from four aspects, including the severity of illness, sleep quality, fatigue, and anxiety. For this purpose, two established acoustic feature sets and support vector machines are utilised. Our experiments show that an average accuracy of .69 obtained estimating the severity of illness, which is derived from the number of days in hospitalisation. We hope that this study can foster an extremely fast, low-cost, and convenient way to automatically detect the COVID-19 disease.

Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading factors for death cause of human beings. In the past decade, heart sound classification has been increasingly studied for its feasibility to develop a non-invasive approach to monitor a subject's health status. Particularly, relevant studies have benefited from the fast development of wearable devices and machine learning techniques. Nevertheless, finding and designing efficient acoustic properties from heart sounds is an expensive and time-consuming task. It is known that transfer learning methods can help extract higher representations automatically from the heart sounds without any human domain knowledge. However, most existing studies are based on models pre-trained on images, which may not fully represent the characteristics inherited from audio. To this end, we propose a novel transfer learning model pretrained on large scale audio data for a heart sound classification task. In this study, the PhysioNet CinC Challenge Dataset is used for evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that, our proposed pre-trained audio models can outperform other popular models pre-trained by images by achieving the highest unweighted average recall at 89.7 %.

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Computer audition (CA) has experienced a fast development in the past decades by leveraging advanced signal processing and machine learning techniques. In particular, for its non-invasive and ubiquitous character by nature, CA based applications in healthcare have increasingly attracted attention in recent years. During the tough time of the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), scientists and engineers in data science have collaborated to think of novel ways in prevention, diagnosis, treatment, tracking, and management of this global pandemic. On one hand, we have witnessed the power of 5G, internet of things, big data, computer vision, and artificial intelligence in applications of epidemiology modelling, drug and/or vaccine finding and designing, fast CT screening, and quarantine management. On the other hand, relevant studies in exploring the capacity of CA are extremely lacking and underestimated. To this end, we propose a novel multi-task speech corpus for COVID-19 research usage. We collected 51 confirmed COVID-19 patients' in-the-wild speech data in Wuhan city, China. We define three main tasks in this corpus, i. e., three-category classification tasks for evaluating the physical and/or mental