Design and Development of a Digital Stethoscope for Cardiac Murmur

Abstract

The stethoscope has been used for many years, and it has been very effective to diagnose certain pulmonologic and cardiologic sounds. From many years healthcare professionals would listen quietly to patients internal organs so they could diagnose from specific sounds of such internal organs. The sound level of an acoustic stethoscope is very low, making heart diagnosis more difficult. In this paper, an electronic stethoscope, which is based on embedded processors, is designed to fulfill the shortages from the auscultation. It converts acoustic sound into electrical signal and this signal is amplified and heard on speakers, so there is no need of headphone for listening heart sounds. Heart Beats per Minute (HBM) is displayed on LCD. The cardiac sound waveform is displayed using MATLAB on a PC via UART interface of the microcontroller. It serves as a platform for potential Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) applications for the detection of cardiac murmurs which offers signal amplification and also added functionalities like storage, analysis and visual representation of sound signals.