Cofounder, Hyfe
Search every verified Joe Brew interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Joe Brew, cofounder and CEO of Hyfe, has been discussing the company's cough-tracking technology in several interviews and explainer videos. He described how the CoughPro app uses a phone's microphone to detect explosive sounds, saves a 0.5-second audio clip, and categorizes it as cough or non-cough using an on-device AI model. Brew stated that the audio is processed locally and deleted immediately, with only the timestamp of a detected cough being saved. He compared the app's listening behavior to voice assistants like Siri or Alexa, saying it listens only for cough-like sounds rather than recording general audio. In podcast appearances, Brew discussed Hyfe's focus on cough as a prevalent symptom across chronic conditions and infectious diseases. He noted that the company initially developed the app for COVID-19 monitoring but found that chronic cough patients became the primary users. Brew described Hyfe's business model as B2B, licensing its algorithms to researchers and pharmaceutical companies, while keeping the consumer app free. He also mentioned conducting validation trials and having pre-submission meetings with the FDA regarding medical clearance. Brew expressed interest in using acoustic data for early outbreak detection and tuberculosis screening, and he emphasized the importance of measuring cough objectively rather than relying on patient self-reporting.
“Cough needs to be measured. When you go with a cough, what do they do? They ask you how's your cough and you're supposed to somehow answer, yet people are being treated for cough all the time without measuring anything — cough is a sporadic longitudinal thing and unless the doctor comes home with you and sits by your b...”
“A professor gave me the book The Death of a Disease about D.A. Henderson who led the smallpox eradication campaign — if you want to save dozens or hundreds of lives go do medicine, and if you want to save millions of lives go do public health.”
“Dirty water largely kills young children — diarrhea is one of the largest murderers of children on earth; diarrhea and many waterborne diseases are preventable and treatable, and every child deserves clean water and rapid treatment when sick.”
“It's not a question of willpower — the U.S. is an obesogenic environment: food deserts, a need to drive everywhere, and infrastructure that makes healthy choices very difficult compared with many European cities where walking and transit are built into daily life.”
“Hyfe is obsessed with cough because cough is the world's most prevalent symptom — it appears across chronic conditions like COPD or asthma and infectious diseases like flu and COVID — and nearly everyone now carries a phone with a microphone so we can use audio to measure cough.”
“We shipped a half‑baked app into the wild and learned by doing — instead of the COVID use case we anticipated, chronic cough patients found the app and taught us what the real product-market fit was.”
“Our revenue model is B2B: we license our cough detection and analysis algorithms and platforms to researchers, pharmaceutical companies running trials, and remote patient monitoring providers — the consumer cough tracker app in the U.S. is free and will remain free.”
“Quantifying cough gives patients something concrete — when they show hourly cough counts to doctors, clinicians take them seriously and the data can reveal triggers (like reflux after eating) or point toward different therapies.”
“Cough counting is coming as a medical use case; we've already done validation trials and had multiple pre-submission meetings with the FDA and plan to submit for clearance so it can be integrated into medical decision‑making.”
“A lot of the apathy or indifference toward suffering is driven by ignorance; it's the duty of educators and people with influence to point young people toward real experience and awareness so they stop taking basic things for granted.”
“CoughPro is not listening, at least no more than your iPhone is listening for the word Siri or your Android is listening for 'hey Google' or your Echo is listening for Alexa.”
“CoughPro is listening for explosive cough-like sounds and when it detects one it gets passed through an algorithm to determine if the values are consistent with cough or not.”
“When a cough is detected the only thing that's saved is the time when that cough occurred.”
“Nothing gets recorded and saved — there's nothing to listen to, nobody listens to those sounds nor could they; the whole process happens in milliseconds and leaves no trace other than the time stamp of the cough.”
“The phone's microphone detects explosive sounds—door slams, dishes banging, or cough—and when it detects the onset of an explosive sound it saves just 0.5 seconds which then gets categorized as either cough or non-cough.”
Joe Brew is a data scientist with a background in public health. Joe has worked in infectious disease control surveillance, ...
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How exactly does CoughPro know when you cough and track it? 🌬️ We get this question a lot, so here's our CEO Joe Brew ...
(0:00) Jason kicks off the show (2:48) How does Hyfe work? (9:03) Notion - Sign up for FREE at https://notion.com/jason (10:32) Acoustic AI and its potential (14:57) What is a cough, and why do they happen? (17:17) Chronic Cough (21:06) Hyperice - Get $50 off your order of $150 or more with code TWIST50 at https://hyperice.com/ (22:34) Managing a cough (25:18) Diagnosing other diseases through audio (31:56) Licensing the technology and pandemic prevention (38:47) Mayfair - Get 4.35% APY on your cash and increase your FDIC insurance coverage at https://getmayfair.com/twist (40:16) Qua…
Who knew that measuring a cough could make such an impact on the world. Join me as I discuss with Joe Brew, Co-Founder of ...
It's Wednesday which can mean only one thing...there's a fresh Review the Brew in town, and here it be. This time is the turn of a LAGER if you can believe it. Watch to find out more.
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