A low-cost computerised electronic stethoscope with pre-diagnosis and easy transmission features

Abstract

Digital stethoscopes already exist in the market. However, their prices are not always affordable by many medical doctors and patients and most of them do not embed the telemedicine and/or the pre-diagnostic features. Thus, the proposed system presents a novel approach to record, save, process, analyse, diagnose and send data coming from the stethoscope to the healthcare professional that is not present near the patient. This low-cost system aims also to give a pre-diagnosis regarding his heart and/or his chest behaviours. The prediagnostic and the data processing are executed using LabView software. Some of the system features are to save the records of the patient and compare them over time, transmit the saved signal to the doctor's email or uploading them on the web, show the placement of the stethoscope sensors depending on the required reading, etc. Good results were obtained when comparing the exact values (using the conventional stethoscope) and the transmitted ones (file generated when recording the heart/lung signals). Added to that, the basic diagnoses given by the software were not far from the real ones. 60 persons were tested by three medical doctors and signals generated from the systems were almost the same as the exact signals. Thus, the proposed system could be bought by any patient or healthcare professional for its accurate results, easy handling, portability and telemedicine feature.Keywords: digital stethoscope; LabView; analogue and digital filters; healthcare professionals; diagnosis phase; telemedicine.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Abi Zeid Daou, R., Sadek, K., Bou Karim, M. and Makhlouf, P. (2017) 'A low-cost computerised electronic stethoscope with pre-diagnosis and easy transmission features', Int.

A Lung Sound Category Recognition Method Based on Wavelet Decomposition and BP Neural Network

“…However, conventional auscultation of lung sounds has a very limited usage because of the limitation of information it can obtain, its dependence on physician's experience, and its high rate of misdiagnosis. Therefore, it will be helpful to develop an efficient method to recognize lung sounds and to diagnose related diseases based on the analysis of the more informative lung sounds data collected by electronic stethoscope and develop an efficient way to recognize lung sounds and its related diseases 7,8. During diagnosis process, it is helpful for accurately judging characteristic vectors and determining disease reasons to de-noise lung sounds and abstract vibration frequency, sound waves amplitude and amplitude gradient 9-12.…”