Introduction and objectives:

The hearing loss supposes a severe handicap for any professional whose activity is based on the recognition of sounds. In the case of health professionals, auscultation is a routine activity and the condition of hearing loss limits it to a variable degree depending on the severity of the same. Those health professionals who, due to the severity of their hearing loss, need the use of hearing aids, find routines based on the use of the stethoscope difficult. The objective of this work is to describe the process to develop a smartphone application that allows real-time reproduction, recording and analysis of sounds to facilitate the work of health professionals with hearing loss. Methods. We have collected cardiac, pulmonary and abdominal somatosounds from healthy and pathological subjects in order to characterize them spectrographically. Then, the application has been designed in order to facilitate the diagnostic work of the hypoacoustic healthcare professional, considering the previous characterization to optimize listening and analysis of cardiac, pulmonary and abdominal sounds. Moreover, in order to maximize the number of compatible devices, it has been developed for the Android operating system, the most widespread in the market.

Results:

An App for Android-based smartphones has been developed (called STETHOSCOPE) that configures the phone as a stethoscope, picking up the somatosounds through its microphone (being possible to use only the internal microphone of the Smartphone as external microphones of high quality to through its JACK connector), processing the signal until finally sending it via Bluetooth to the hearing aid of the hearing impaired professional. This application allows you to record and graphically represent heart sounds, lungs and abdominals in Android devices and store them in WAV format without compression with a 32-bit FLOAT IEEE coding, allowing your file, comparison or sharing with other professionals.

Conclusion:

In this study, we present a novel application designed to use the smartphone as a stethoscope, sending the captured sound to the hearing aid (wirelessly) of the physician with hearing loss.

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