Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Jul 22, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 12, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 13, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Development of a Low-Cost Ear-Contactless Stethoscope Powered by Raspberry Pi: A Solution to the Auscultation Difficulty on Patients with COVID-19
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the battle against COVID-19, auscultation examination was essential, especially to patients with poor respiratory conditions, such as severe pneumonia, respiratory dysfunction, and intensive cases who were intubated and assisted with ventilators. However, auscultation was hard to be accomplished on the infected patients due to the safety concern and unavailability for medical workers wearing personal protective suits.
Objective:
The objective of our study was to design and develop an electronic stethoscope with the characteristics of ear-contactless auscultation, low-cost property, and digital storage for further analysis. An assessment of its clinical feasibility should also be made with the comparison to the electronic stethoscope currently in use.
Methods:
We developed a prototype of the electronic stethoscope without ear-contact, Auscul Pi, powered by Raspberry Pi and Python, which can make real-time auscultation sounds played with a micro-speaker instead of ear pieces, and it can also store data files for further analysis. We utilized this stethoscope to assess the feasibility by detecting abnormal heart and breath sounds from 8 patients by comparing it with 3M Littmann electronic stethoscope, and 2 healthy volunteers were included for controls. We then plotted the phonocardiography of heart sounds for visualization for the comparisons.
Results:
We were able to operate Auscul Pi conveniently and record the auscultation sounds precisely in practice from the aspects of ergonomics and information technology. A total of 10 participants were recruited to receive auscultation examination with Auscul Pi and 3M Littmann electronic stethoscope. In terms of the real-time playout and recorded audio of heart sounds and breath sounds, the Auscul Pi showed consistency to 3M Littmann. As for the heart sounds, we also plotted phonocardiograph based on the data generated by Auscul Pi and 3M Littmann, and aligned them with the cardiac cycle of ECG respectively. The phonocardiography showed good conformity between Auscul Pi and 3M Littmann according to the waveforms.
Conclusions:
Auscul Pi is feasible to perform the auscultation in clinical practice by applying real-time ear-contactless playout and later quantified analysis of auscultation sounds. So, it is expected to benefit the patients with COVID-19 examined by medical employees wearing protective suits and having difficulties in auscultation. Clinical Trial: ChiCTR.org.cn ChiCTR2000033830; http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=54971
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.