Design and Implementation of Microcontroller - Based Electronic Stethoscope

Abstract

Using acoustic stethoscope is not efficient always because of the limited sensitivity of the human ear in addition to the noise and artifact. This fact led to the invention of the electronic stethoscope. In this thesis an electronic stethoscope has been designed and implemented to process, analyze and record heart sounds in real time. This will help in auscultation and diagnosis. Two types of designs are introduced. The first was microcontroller based electronic stethoscope, while the other was PC based electronic stethoscope. A system of algorithms for analysis of heart sounds has been applied using time-frequency representations. This system performs calculations to obtain some parameters that give useful indicators and help in diagnosis. The algorithms calculate the timing of heart sound components, the duration of each of them, and their energy then plot their spectrogram. The sound components include first heart sound, second heart sound and abnormalities like murmur. These algorithms have been applied on normal and abnormal heart sounds in some Sudanese specialized hospitals. The designed electronic stethoscope gave good and valuable results in recording and analysis of heart sounds.