Electronic Stethoscope for eHealth and Telemedicine

Abstract

The success of ehealth and telemedicine depend on the development of advanced medical equipment that can streamline the tasks of medical data collection, processing and archiving. Audio signals detected by stethoscopes are some of the basic data used by medical doctors on a daily basis but there is no systematic approach to process, transmit and archive the collected data digitally. This may due to the fact that the electronic stethoscopes are still relatively expensive. General use of electronic stethoscope by physicians will not happen until the cost is dropped to an “affordable” level and/or the stethoscope has additional features and capabilities not found in current versions.
Affordable electronic stethoscopes enable all doctors to collect and archive acoustic medical signal easily. Furthermore, a feature-laden device may also be used by non-medical specialists to collect data remotely for medical doctors. Also, a “user friendly” version of the electronic stethoscope that elderlies may easily use to transmit their own heart and lung audio signals to their family physicians via the telephone or Internet would be a good tool for telemedicine.
We are investigating the desirable features and requirements, and formulating the specification for an affordable electronic stethoscope for ehealth and telemedicine. Issues of data collection, pre-processing, transmission, and storage, as well as future possible expansion to accommodate additional modules for further data post-processing and integration with other electronic medical devices, are considered.