Digital Stethoscope Can Record, Playback, And Analyzer Heart Sounds

It’s somewhat amazing how these rather inexpensive electronics can augment the functionality of a common stethoscope. This digital stethoscope is using audio processing to add the features. A standard chest piece feeds a condenser microphone which is fed through a pretty standard OpAmp circuit which supplies the ADC of an ATmega644. After being digitized, the heart sound can be recorded in ten second increments to a 1 Mb flash memory chip. The data can also be fed to MATLAB via a USB cable in real-time. There it is displayed as a waveform and the heart rate is calculated on the fly. Check  out the video after the break for a great demo of the system.

The picture above shows a set of ear buds used as output. But this is a standard headphone jack, so the heart sounds can be played on speakers which we think would come in handy for teaching purposes. There’s also the option to hook it to a computer input which could be the audio used for a Skype session if a doctor is not close at hand. There is lots of potential here at a fairly low cost and we love that!

7 thoughts on “Digital Stethoscope Can Record, Playback, And Analyzer Heart Sounds

  1. Argh, had to listen to 3 minutes of bs before they actually let us hear it in action. It’s useless, sound quality is very poor.

    Believe it or not I rarely crack out my stethoscope to calculate someone’s heart rate. In fact apart from slow normal fast heart rate is not particular important.

    Looks fancy though.

    What I did see that is interesting is a stethoscope which let you shift the sounds heart moving infra, and ultra sound into the audible spectrum.

  2. Just read about an article called TeleMedicine. They have highlighted about something referred as digital Steth. This will definetly add value to modern science.

    Kudos guys!!!

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