Objective: Cough is so common that the best method for evaluating nocturnal cough in children is required.
Methods: We developed a cough monitoring system by evaluating 50 child volunteers, and validated the cough monitor in 20 samples from 10 children with cough overnight. Coughs were recorded using a video camera and digital sound recording. At the same time, our system with microphone and accelerometer was used. The number of coughs in each eight hour video-audio recording was counted manually by three trained observers, and all cough data were printed out and the defined cough events, using both these printed-out data and video-audio recordings, were then calculated by three observers.
Results: The cough monitoring system demonstrated excellent agreement between the number of coughs counted by volunteers, and those counted by cough monitoring system (sensitivity 98.8%, specificity 97.8%). Also, there was significant agreement in the counts of coughs between the video-audio method and our system (P < 0.0001), and between the defined cough events and our system (P < 0.0001).
Conclusions: Our method demonstrated well agreement with the video-audio recording method in children, and is considered to be highly useful for the objective monitoring of overnight cough in children with respiratory diseases.
Keywords: children; cough; cough monitoring system; overnight.
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.