The medical professional wearing a stethoscope is a familiar image, but Northwestern University wants to change that. Instead of someone hanging an ancient device around their neck to listen inside of you, they want to put sticky sensors on patients to continuously monitor sounds from hearts, lungs, and the GI tract.
The tiny devices stick to your skin and wirelessly beam audio to clinicians for analysis. They’ve tested the devices on people ranging from people with chronic lung disease to premature babies. In fact, you can hear breath sounds (and crying) from a microphone attached to a baby in the video below. The device uses noise suppression to remove the crying sounds effectively.
The 40 mm by 20 mm by 8 mm devices contain flash memory, batteries, Bluetooth, and two tiny microphones. As you might guess, one microphone faces the patient, and the other one faces away to capture noise for cancellation.
Collecting sound from multiple points continuously could be a game changer. We can only guess what the device will cost, but keep in mind that creating it to medical standards and pushing it through certification means it probably won’t be as inexpensive as you’d think just from the bill of materials.
Still, we have a feeling we will see more of these in the years to come in hospitals, clinics, and maybe even doctor’s offices. We have seen smart noise-canceling stethoscopes before. If you are satisfied with the old-fashioned kind, why not 3D print one?
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- Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/11/26/in-new-doctors-office-stethoscope-wears-you/
