Auscultation Using Modern Mobile Communication

Abstract

This paper presents a relatively simple trial of a method for transmitting audio signals derived through auscultation. Current smartphones are widely used because of the availability of numerous new applications. On the basis of modern wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth, modern mobile communication systems, and modern electronic stethoscopes, we developed a real-time mobile-based auscultation (RMA) that can be applied to distant healthcare systems to improve the convenience of performing real-time auscultation on patients. We inserted a small-scale microphone attached to the earset of a smartphone (HTC Desire 626) into the ear tip of a stethoscope (3M Littmann model 3200) to transmit sound through a mobile device when the mobile dials and connects to another phone or mobile. Another smartphone (Samsung Core Prime) was used as a receiver. We investigated the signal of the received versus the signal relayed into the earphone of the transmitter in the forms of original, normalised, and spectrogram in linear scale of the signals, respectively. The respective correlation coefficients were 0.5419, 0.5419, and 0.8461 \((p < 0.01)\). The correlation coefficient was higher than 0.85 \((p < 0.01)\) when those signals were transmitted in decibels (dB) to the spectrogram. This high-positive correlation supports the feasibility of the RMA. The environmental noise levels ranged from 25 to 40 dB. Achieving this noise level condition by using the RMA is easy.