Cough is one of the commonest symptoms. Individual explosive cough sounds，epochs(i.e. bursts of cough sounds) or the time spent on coughing provide very important clinical information for the diagnosis of cough. Accordingly，extraction of the information by the means of cough assessment is of great value for cough diagnosis，therapy and curative effect evaluation. Recent developments of cough assessment technologies including basic principles，instruments and results of verification test are discussed in this paper，three kinds of instruments published in the markets as the key points. Finally，certain difficult points of current cough assessment methods and the trend of the technologies are further presented.