Design of Dual Transduction-Based CMOS-MEMS Electronic Stethoscope

Abstract

The stethoscope provides primary information about the heart and the lungs. It enables rough diagnosis of the functionalities of heart and lungs of the human body through the pick-up of emitted sound from within them. Acoustic determination of the functionality of the critical organs must have high accuracy to reduce mortality rate. Manual examination and diagnosis with reliance on sound have poor reliability due to the nature of high interference causing inaccuracy. Second order harmonics are significantly high due to such interferences resulting in distortion. There is a need for technical advancement for efficient and seamless pick up of the bio-sounds. Existing electronic stethoscope design is cumbersome and uneconomical. A novel dual transduction technique is proposed in this CMOS-MEMS electronic stethoscope design, which produce high SNR value and high sensitivity. This proposed electronic stethoscope includes two microsensors, viz. piezoresistors and the piezoelectric device that provides high accuracy. Dual transduction enables pick up off of two bands of frequency that emanates the function of the heart and the lungs with great precision.