For all their education, medical practitioners sometimes forget that what’s old hat to them is new territory for their patients. [David Revoy] learned that when a recent visit to the veterinarian resulted in the need to monitor his cat’s pulse rate at home, a task that he found difficult enough that he hacked together this digital cat stethoscope.
Never fear; [David] makes it clear that his fur-baby [Geuloush] is fine, although the gel needed for an echocardiogram likely left the cat permanently miffed. With a normal feline heart rate in the 140s, [David] found it hard to get an accurate pulse by palpation, so he bought a cheap stethoscope and a basic lavalier USB microphone. Getting them together was as easy as cutting the silicone tubing from the stethoscope head and sticking the microphone into it.
The tricky part, of course, would be getting [Geuloush] to cooperate. That took some doing, but soon enough [David] had a clean recording to visualize in an audio editor. From there it’s just a simple matter of counting up the peaks and figuring out the beats per second. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to build a small counter using a microcontroller so he doesn’t have to count on the cat napping near his PC, but in our experience, keyboards are pretty good cat attractants.
This is one of those nice, quick hacks whose simplicity belies their impact. It’s certainly not as fancy as some of the smart stethoscopes we’ve seen, but it doesn’t need to be.
Thanks to [Spooner] for the tip.
Purfection. These are the hacks I adore. Show us more 20$ hacks that can do cool things like keep kitties healthy! This could also be useful for diagnostics of pumps and other activities I’m sure.
I trust the author here, I’m sure just about any stethoscope and lapel microphone would work here. It still would be nice to have some suggestions or pictures of the assembly :).
It’s a Cat Scan!
Hopefully, there’s a small heater in the stethoscope head — you know how a cold stethoscope feels on your own back, and can extrapolate how a cat would feel about being “petted” by a cold vs. warm object. ;-)
Stethoscopes are generally cold because the doctor just cleaned them with 70% Etoh and Etoh evaporates quickly. You want the to be cold is means they are clean.
Great hack, I have tried this 15 years ago but never managed to get sound. Did he plug the hole on the back of the scope?