A team at the Indian Institute of Technology of Bombay (IIT-B) has developed a"smart stethoscope" that can listen to heartbeats in a distance and record them, minimizing the chance of health professionals ridding the novel coronavirus from patients. The information or the auscultated noise from a patient's torso is sent to the physician using Bluetooth, doing away with the necessity to proceed near to carry readings, according to members of the team.
The IIT-B group has received a patent for the system that records the auscultated sound and stores it as a portion of a patient's health record. This is sometimes shared with other doctors for evaluation as well as follow-ups.
Running a startup called"AyuDevice" from the IIT's tech business incubator, the group has delivered 1,000 stethoscopes to various hospitals and health care centres throughout the country. The product has been developed with clinical inputs from physicians at Reliance Hospital and PD Hinduja Hospital.
"Patients diagnosed with coronavirus frequently experience shortness of breath, leading to acute respiratory distress syndrome. Doctors use the (traditional) stethoscope to follow chest sounds like wheezing and crackles that look with all the progress of the disease," among those developers Adarhsa K explained.
This, however, poses a risk to physicians, as evident by the increasing infections reported among healthcare professionals handling COVID-19 patients, he said.
Giving information about the digital stethoscope, Adarsha stated it"includes a tube connected to two earpieces. The tube transmits sounds from the body whilst eliminating background noise that might interfere with the diagnosis".
"The next advantage is the stethoscope is able to amplify and filter many sounds and interpret them into a digital signal, which can be further amplified for optimal listening," he explained.
"The signal can then be shown as a phonocardiogram onto a smartphone or notebook. By comparison, a normal stethoscope is limited when it comes to amplifying sounds and there is no means of recording those sharing and sounds from 1 place to another. Even visualization isn't feasible, so one can't observe the graph and identify abnormalities," he added.
The death toll because of this novel coronavirus climbed to 239 and the number of instances to 7,447 in the nation on Saturday, according to the Union Health Ministry.
While the number of busy COVID-19 cases is 6,565, as many as 642 individuals were discharged and treated and one had migrated, it stated.
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