Cough Radar

Reading Time: 2 minutes
This morning, for the first time in months I used Sleepcycle manually to mark the start and end of my sleep and I noticed that they added the Cough Radar. This is a quick and easy way of seeing whether there is a lot of coughin in the region where you live, or not.

I find this to be interesting. Governments are no longer tracking COVID and other diseases so we’re flying blind. With an app like SleepCycle current beta testing coughing nearby we have an interesting incite into how clean the air is, or how sick people are.

That’s because coughing could be provoked by air pollution. If there is a forest fire, or heavy smog then people will struggle to breath and air pollution will affect whether they’re coughing, or not.

If the air is clean then people could be coughing due to colds, the flu and other diseases. It’s a good way of establishing whether a region is healthy or not. It’s also interesting to see that the tracking of coughing has now been extrapolated and illustrated with heat maps. I won’t share the heatmap I see, for privacy reasons.

The makers of SleepCycle wrote about the feature [here](https://www.sleepcycle.com/features/cough-radar/). By aggregating this data over weeks, months, and years policy makers can look at this data and decide whether to encourage mask wearing, air filtration and more. It could be used to track seasonal and regional changes.

There are four classifications. Normal, Elevated, High, and No Data. I am not clear whether this feature is available via Test Flight or the Premium version of Sleep Cycle for me. I used to be on the Testflight version.

## And Finally

This is a sleep tracking app so it tracks coughing within peoples homes, not out in the street or in offices, unless someone is tracking their office siestas. It represents active users of the app rather than the situation more globally. It reflects the health of sleep cycle users.