Disrupting Chronic Cough: Julian Circo Brings AI to the World's Oldest Symptom
In this episode of Disruption Interruption, Julian Circo, Co-Founder of Hyfe, joins host Karla Jo Helms to discuss revolutionizing respiratory diagnostics. Circo explains how Hyfe uses AI to turn coughing into an objective biomarker, offering hope for chronic cough sufferers through digital therapeutics.
TAMPA BAY, Fla., Feb. 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- While a cough is one of the most common medical complaints, accounting for as many as 30 million clinical visits per year, it remains one of the least understood symptoms in modern medicine. Doctors have historically relied on subjective patient recall rather than hard data, leading to stalled research and failed drug trials. Julian Circo, Co-Founder of Hyfe, joins host Karla Jo Helms on the Disruption Interruption podcast to discuss how his company is solving this century-old problem by using acoustic AI to turn sound into science.
"We are building the step counter for cough," says Circo. "Just the way that you measure your steps or your heart rate... we do that for cough. It is a key indicator to other major aspects of health."
The Mystery of the Common Cough
Despite the prevalence of coughing, the medical community lacks a standardized baseline for what constitutes a "healthy" amount of coughing. Without objective measurement tools, diagnoses rely heavily on guesswork, and pharmaceutical advancements have struggled to gain traction. This lack of data has left millions of chronic cough sufferers without effective treatment options.
"Science could not answer the simple question of 'what is a normal amount of coughing for a healthy person?'" explains Circo. "If you go to the top three hospitals and ask the best pulmonologist in each of them, their answer probably will differ quite significantly from each other. They don't know what the regular amount of coughing is."
Collecting the necessary data to train AI models is notoriously difficult due to background noise and environmental variables. "If I scrape sounds from YouTube, they may sound like coughs to my ear, but to a machine, they contain noise that I do not see," Circo notes. "If you build an AI on those sorts of sounds, it's going to act really funny because it will interpret noise as signal."
Turning Sound into Biomarkers
Hyfe overcame the data shortage by launching a consumer app during the pandemic and collecting over 700 million samples to build the world's largest cough dataset. This massive influx of real-world data allowed them to distinguish coughs from background noise, creating a frequency chart that functions much like an electrocardiogram (ECG) for respiratory health.
"We look at cough as a point in a frequency chart," illustrates Circo. "It's like an ECG basically. The heartbeat is one thing, but the relative time between heartbeats and the frequency of heartbeats over time becomes very, very insightful."
Beyond diagnostics, Hyfe is pioneering a digital therapeutic for chronic coughers, a group that includes one in ten Americans. By digitizing behavioral cough suppression therapy, they offer real-time feedback to patients.
"We tell the patient exactly when to do which exercise based on actual objective cough frequency, and then we see immediately if it worked or not," says Circo. "We already have 40% efficacy on this digital therapy."
Links
Disrupting Diagnostics: How AI is Turning Your Cough into a Biomarker with Julian Circo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/icirco/
Company Website: https://www.hyfe.com/
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Disruption is happening on an unprecedented scale, impacting all manner of industries— MedTech, Finance, IT, eCommerce, shipping, logistics, and more—and COVID has moved their timelines up a full decade or more. But WHO are these disruptors and when did they say, "THAT'S IT! I'VE HAD IT!"? Time to Disrupt and Interrupt with host Karla Jo "KJ" Helms, veteran communications disruptor. KJ interviews badasses who are disrupting their industries and altering economic networks that have become antiquated with an establishment resistant to progress. She delves into uncovering secrets from industry rebels and quiet revolutionaries that uncover common traits—and not-so-common—that are changing our economic markets… and lives. Visit the world's key pioneers that persist to success, despite arrows in their backs at www.disruption-interruption.com.
About Julian Circo
Julian Circo is a pioneering entrepreneur operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence, respiratory health, and global impact. As the Co-Founder of Hyfe, he is transforming coughing, one of medicine's most common yet least understood symptoms, into an objective, quantifiable biomarker through acoustic AI and the world's largest cough dataset, containing over 700 million samples.
Before building Hyfe into a global leader in precision cough care, Julian founded and scaled multiple impact ventures across healthcare and fintech. His career is uniquely shaped by decades of frontline leadership in some of the world's most challenging environments, including humanitarian missions and senior operational roles supporting global organizations in Somalia, Mozambique, East Timor, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Today, Julian is advancing the emerging field of acoustic epidemiology, using bodily sounds such as coughs and wheezing to improve disease prediction, diagnostics, and digital therapeutics. Beyond Hyfe, he remains actively involved with several mission-driven ventures as an advisor, investor, board member, and advocate for innovation that combines profitability with measurable social good.
About Karla Jo Helms
Karla Jo Helms is the Chief Evangelist and Anti-PR® Strategist for JOTO PR Disruptors™. Karla Jo learned firsthand how unforgiving business can be when millions of dollars are on the line — and how the control of public opinion often determines whether one company is happily chosen, or another is brutally rejected. Being an alumnus of crisis management, Karla Jo has worked with litigation attorneys, private investigators, and the media to help restore companies of goodwill into the good graces of public opinion — Karla Jo operates on the ethic of getting it right the first time, not relying on second chances and doing what it takes to excel. Helms speaks globally on public relations, how the PR industry itself has lost its way, and how, in the right hands, corporations can harness the power of Anti-PR to drive markets and impact market perception.
References
Sharma, S., Hashmi, M. F., & Alhajjaj, M. S. (2023, August 8). Cough. PubMed; StatPearls Publishing. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493221/
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SOURCE Disruption Interruption
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