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BT 53 9 April 2020

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09.04.2020 TRENDSETTING IN light of the sensitive situation aris- ing from COVID-19, Cool Ride-Pool- ing is now allowing clients to deliver or pick-up any items whilst staying safe at home. For this reason, clients can book rides from their personal accounts, simply to transport goods instead of themselves. Cool, right? Here's a little breakdown of how it will work. To deliver to someone: • Book a ride from the place from where you would like to pick-up the items. • Once our driver arrives, he or she will give you a call to let you know they are there. • At this point advise the driver where you will leave the pack- age. Our driver will pick it up safely and deliver it to the select- ed drop-off location. • You can follow on the app the car on route, like that knowing where and when the delivery has been made, giving you the opportunity to advise whoever is meant to pick-up at the other end that the package has arrived. To pick-up from someone/some- where: • Pick-up works pretty much like above, just when booking you have to first include pick-up location and drop-off to your home. • Once arriving at the pick-up lo- cation, the driver will call you and you can tell him from which residence/shop your pick-up is. It is very important, that if the location is a shop, that they are advised that package will be picked up by Cool driver. • You can then follow the driver as he brings the package to your doorstep, avoiding any contact. This new service does not apply to cooked food items unless they are vac- uum packed. Also, all items purchased from shops, have to be paid for. For those who require leaving their house, Cool are still operating private rides as a precaution. Cool Ride Pooling is now offering a delivery service for clients' items A new app, which will be used to collect data to develop machine learning algorithms that could au- tomatically detect whether a person is suffering from COVID-19 based on the sound of their voice, their breathing and coughing, has been launched by researchers at the Uni- versity of Cambridge. The COVID-19 Sounds App is now available as a web app for Chrome and Firefox browsers. Versions for Android and iOS will be available soon. As COVID-19 is a respiratory con- dition, the sounds made by people with the condition – including voice, breathing and cough sounds – are very specific. A large, crowdsourced data set will be useful in developing machine learning algorithms that could be used for automatic detec- tion of the condition. "There's still so much we don't know about this virus and the illness it causes, and in a pandemic situa- tion like the one we're currently in, the more reliable information you can get, the better," said Professor Cecilia Mascolo from Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology, who led the devel- opment of the app. "I am amazed at the speed that we managed to connect across the Uni- versity to conceive this project, and how Cecilia's team of developers came together to respond to the ur- gency of the situation," said Profes- sor Pietro Cicuta from Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, a member of the team behind the app's develop- ment. Professor Andres Floto, Pro- fessor of Respiratory Biology at the University, and Research Director of the Cambridge Centre for Lung In- fection at Papworth Hospital, Cam- bridge, has also advised on the clini- cal aspects of the app. The COVID-19 Sounds App col- lects basic demographic and medi- cal information from users, as well as spoken voice samples, breathing and coughing samples through the phone's microphone. The app will also ask users if they have tested positive for the coronavirus. In addition, the app will collect one coarse grain location sample. The app will not track users, and will only collect location data once when users are actively using it. The data will be stored on University servers and be used solely for research pur- poses. The app will not provide any medical advice. Once they have completed their in- itial analysis of the data collected by the app, the team will release the da- taset to other researchers. The data- set could help shed light on disease progression, further relationship of the respiratory complication with medical history, for example. "Having spoken to doctors, one of the most common things they have noticed about patients with the vi- rus is the way they catch their breath when they're speaking, as well as a dry cough, and the intervals of their breathing patterns," said Mascolo. "There are very few large datasets of respiratory sounds, so to make better algorithms that could be used for early detection, we need as many samples from as many par- ticipants as we can get. Even if we don't get many positive cases of coro- navirus, we could find links with other health conditions." The study has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the De- partment of Computer Science and Tech- nology, and is part- ly funded by the European Research Council through Project EAR. New app collects the sounds of COVID-19

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