Electronic Stethoscope Design

Abstract

Nowadays, despite the developing technology lots of patients lost their lives because of wrong and late diagnosis. With early diagnosis, most diseases and negative effects of the diseases for the patient can be prevented. Early diagnosis can also prevent cardiological diseases. Although auscultation of the chest with a stethoscope is an effective and basic method, a stethoscope isn't enough for the diagnosis of some diseases. One example of these diseases is heart valve malfunctions when the valves do not work as desired heart murmurs occur. The main goal of this project is to develop an electronic stethoscope and observing obtained signals as a graphic. The main difficulty while auscultation of chest with a stethoscope is, this procedure needs lots of experience and also even tough physician have enough experience, it's very hard to diagnose grade 1 and 2 heart murmurs. Furthermore, while auscultation tachycardia patients, generally it's very hard to decide where the first heart (S1) sound and second heart sound (S2) begins. In this project, it is planned to demonstrate heart sounds as a graphic. This method provides physicians to diagnose all kinds of chest sounds easily even the sounds which they cannot diagnose or recognize with their ears by stethoscope. Moreover, as the chest sounds are obtained as digital data, these data can be sent as desired. When a physician needs to get someone else's idea, these recordings can be sent to another professional.