Development Of An Electronic And Simulated Stethoscope

With the acceleration of urbanization,rapid population growth,and the aging of the population,the demand for medical care has increased.Auscultation has always been an essential method for diagnosing.Nowadays,in order to facilitate doctors' diagnosis work,the research mainly focuses on the optimization of auscultative signal,the visualization of diagnosis,the automated auscultation,etc.However,the electronic auscultation teaching equipment who is able to simulate the syndrome's scenario is still an absence in clinical auscultation teaching domain.This paper develops an electronic and simulated stethoscope which can simulate and rebuild the real clinical auscultation.It can flexibly recreate a variety of syndrome's scenarios and enter into one of them in loading the corresponding audio to each auscultation point in order to rebuild the syndrome's scenario and train the auscultation skill.The main research work of this paper includes: using the Linux operating system based Raspberry Pi 3 who supports file system management,a variety of development environments,and high scalability as the host terminal to develop a multi-threaded management program,and with the help of an audio database corresponding to various auscultation points around the human body which is collected from real scenarios to develop the electronic and simulated stethoscope.Based on the Android platform,the Human-Machine Interface application is developed to access and control the host terminal and manages its file system for recreating and storing syndrome's scenarios in advance,and finally enter into one syndrome's scenario to perform the auscultation simulation.The host machine and the HMI application communicate with each other through a wirelessly Bluetooth module.Finally,the electronic and simulated stethoscope is tested according to the design requirements.Results show that the Android and Linux based electronic and simulated stethoscope meets all its requirements as demanded: it can flexibly create various syndrome's scenarios and play the auscultation simulation.With the advantages of low cost,good portability and strong practicability,it is suitable in auscultation simulation teaching.