How to record a night cough to show a doctor

The cough that kept the house up at 3am has usually gone quiet by the 10am appointment, and describing it from memory is hard when you were half asleep. A few recorded nights and two or three clips picked in advance beat an impression.

Before the first night: keep the audio long enough

The step people miss: CoughWise clears full-night audio after 7 days unless you change it, so with an appointment ten days away the first nights lose their sound before you get there. Before you start, go to More → Local audio storage → Keep full-night audio and choose 30 or 90 days, or star each night you want to keep. The counts and times are kept either way; only the sound expires.

Recording two people, say a child and yourself? One sleeper profile is free. Keeping two people’s nights apart needs Premium, so otherwise record one person at a time, or write down whose night was whose.

Setting up the phone, the same way every night

• Close, but out of reach. For an adult, the nightstand. For a child, a shelf or dresser near the bed or crib, never in it, with the phone and its cable well out of reach.
• Screen down, plugged in. CoughWise reminds you to plug in when the battery is low. If it dies anyway, you keep what was recorded before it did.
• Microphone uncovered. Not under a pillow, not in a drawer, not behind a lamp.
• Same spot every night. Across the room, the same cough sounds different and nights stop being comparable. A strip of tape on the shelf helps.
• Write down the room’s usual noises. Humidifier, fan, heating, the dog, a sibling who talks in their sleep. You will hear all of it in the morning. If the humidifier runs some nights and not others, note which.
• Turn on Do Not Disturb or a Sleep Focus so a late message doesn’t wake anyone.
• Tell anyone who shares the room. The phone hears them too, and it can’t tell whose cough it was.

The next morning: five minutes, not eight hours

1. Look at the hour lane first. Did the counted sounds bunch up soon after lights-out, in the small hours, or towards morning? Jot the rough times down.
2. Play the loudest moments, then a few counted sounds. If one was plainly something else, like a door or the dog shaking its collar, tap “Not a cough” and the night recalculates. Restore undoes it.
3. Don’t chase the exact number. CoughWise counts possible cough-like sounds and may miss some or count others. A night that stands out is worth a note; a difference of three or four isn’t.
4. Set partial nights aside. A night that ended early is labelled partial. Compare full nights with full nights.

Picking clips for the appointment

Choose two or three, not twenty: one that sounds typical, the worst stretch you heard, and one that sounds different from the rest if there is one. For each, write down the date, the rough time and how long that spell went on, in the night’s note or on the appointment checklist.

Clips play inside the app; CoughWise doesn’t export audio. Bring the phone charged, volume up, and find each clip before you go in. Start with your notes and offer the clips; the doctor decides whether hearing one helps.

Numbers on paper

The doctor-visit summary puts your nights on one page: how many were complete, the typical count of possible cough-like sounds per complete night and its range, the clock hours they clustered in, your recent nights and your notes. Page two lists every night, and a CSV comes with it, with the same caveat the app shows. You can preview page one from your own nights for free; exporting it to print or send is part of Premium.

Don’t wait for another recording if…

• someone is struggling to breathe, or their lips or face look blue: for a child, HealthyChildren (American Academy of Pediatrics) says call 911;
• there is any trouble breathing, noisy or fast breathing, chest pain, or blood when coughing (NHS, HealthyChildren);
• the cough is very bad or getting worse quickly (NHS);
• it’s a baby: HealthyChildren advises contacting the doctor within 24 hours for any cough under 6 months, and straight away for a fever under 12 weeks;
• a cough has gone on for more than 3 weeks. Both the NHS and HealthyChildren say to see a doctor.

Doing this with CoughWise

Any voice recorder works for this routine; listening back to a whole night is the slow part. CoughWise is an iPhone app we make for it. It records the night on the phone, counts possible cough-like sounds with an hour lane, ranks the loudest moments to play, and lets you scrub the whole night. Recording and analysis happen on the iPhone, audio is never uploaded, and there is no account.

CoughWise on the App Store

Sources

• NHS: Cough
• HealthyChildren.org (American Academy of Pediatrics): KidsDoc symptom checker, Cough