The Design Of Bluetooth Electronic Stethoscope

Heart sound stethoscope is one of the effective ways to assess the cardiovascular diseases, especially heart valve disease, congenital heart disease and heart disorders. In this paper, an electronic stethoscope, which is based on embedded processors and Bluetooth transmission, is designed to fulfill the shortages from the auscultation, such as the hearing as well as the subjectivity of the doctors, low sensitivity of existing stethoscope, short-distance transport of the signal and sidedness when using less phonocardiogram diagnosis.This stethoscope consists of the portable terminal and the PC terminal. The portable terminal includes the signal pre-processing module and the master module which is based on ARM processor, Linux kernel and Qtopia GUI environment. In the portable device side, the heart sound signal is collected by the sensors and processed by pre-processing module. The power amplifier can playback heart sound in real time by speakers; in the another route, the master module samples the signal and achieves some functions, such as the Phonocardiogram displaying, heart sound playbacking and recording, Bluetooth transmitting and so on. The PC-terminal, as the functional extension of portable terminal, can receive the data by Bluetooth real-time or delayed for playbacking and phonocardiogram displaying. In addition, PC-side software can save the received data and replay for further analysis and computer-aided diagnosis.