Design of Multifunction Stethoscope with Auto Gastrointestinal Wriggle Detector

Abstract

As the acoustic stethoscopes can't compete with the magnified sound quality so the digital stethoscopes provides even better identification of conditions. The objective of this work is to design a digital stethoscope with multifunction modes, which provides sound analysis for different body signals acquired from heart, lungs and abdomen. Using this system a doctor can not only analyze the sounds but also identify the gastrointestinal wriggling occurrence in the human body by evaluation of bowel-sounds. The bowel sounds monitoring plays an important role to know when the patient can begin to take food, especially for those patients who just underwent a major operation after general anesthesia, where the gastro intestine recovery would take several hours. In this system, the digital stethoscope is designed with different filter arrays for different body sounds analysis modes with microcontroller unit to control it.

Keywords: Electronic stethoscope, bowel sounds, heart and lungs sounds, microcontroller