Heart health: Could a smartphone app become a remote stethoscope? – Medical News Today
- Researchers assessed the feasibility of using a smartphone’s inbuilt microphone to record heart sounds by investigating the particular quality associated with smartphone-recorded coronary heart sounds and the factors influencing the quality of the recordings.
- Overall, three out of four recordings were associated with good quality, meaning that they could be processed further in order to obtain medically relevant data.
- The results indicate that will heart sound quality is not influenced by phone version or by the user’s biological sex, but users aged over 60 seemed to have lower-quality songs.
- This study paves the particular way for a future where individuals, particularly those with heart problems, can easily record their own heart sounds at home, thus improving the diagnostic process.
Everyone is familiar with the particular “lub-dub… lub-dub” sounds the heart makes. The reason that the heart makes these sounds is related to its function of circulating blood throughout the body.
The heart muscle pumps blood by continuously contracting plus relaxing. During contraction associated with the center, we hear the “lub” sound, known as the first cardiovascular sound, S1, and during relaxation of the heart, all of us hear the particular “dub” sound —the second heart audio, S2.
The traditional tool used by doctors to listen to heart sounds is the stethoscope .
Coronary heart sounds may be a good useful marker in heart failure , but currently, they are only assessed in a clinical setting. It would be useful for patients to be able to record their own heart sounds when they are at home.
One possible way in which heart sounds may be easily captured by individuals in the comfort of their own homes is by using a smartphone with an inbuilt high-quality microphone. To date, several mobile app prototypes for recording coronary heart sounds have been developed and made available to the public, including
Now, researchers in King’s College London in the United Kingdom and Maastricht University within the Netherlands have conducted a study to investigate the feasibility of using a mobile phone as a stethoscope plus to assess the potential factors that influence the quality of center sound recordings.
“This research proves that mobile technologies are the viable way of recording heart seems and that will in the future, cardiac patients in addition to doctors could use at-home recordings to check for [the] existence or progression of heart conditions, ” says Dr. Pablo Lamata , study co-author and professor of biomedical engineering from King’s University London.
The results of this study appeared in the European Heart Journal – Digital Health .
In collaboration with heart patients through the British Coronary heart Foundation (BHF) and Evelina Children’s Heart Organization (ECHO), and even with experts at Cellule Design Studio , the researchers developed a new smartphone application that measures heart sound.
To use the Echoes app , the user only needs to place their smartphone on their chest together with press “record. ” The application has a signal processing algorithm of which filters the center sound songs to remove any background noise.
The Echoes app asks users in order to voluntarily provide anonymous basic demographics including age, sex, height, weight, and, if applicable, any heart problems.
Between May 21 and additionally October 4, 2021, 1, 148 individuals downloaded the Echoes application and contributed 7, 597 heart audio recordings, which were uploaded to some sort of Google Firebase database.
The particular researchers found that eight out of 10 (80%) users were able to make a good quality cardiovascular sound recording. A “good quality” recording is one the fact that can be interpreted with regard to analysis.
Overall, three from four (75%) recordings could be processed further to be able to obtain clinically relevant data.
Typically the researchers then looked with the aspects affecting the particular quality associated with the very center noise recordings among these users. They discovered that the following factors do not impact the quality of typically the recordings:
- phone version
- user’s biological sex.
However, this researchers observed that customers aged over 60 had lower-quality songs.
During his doctoral thesis defense, Dr . Hongxing Luo , study co-author not to mention postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University argued that often the issue regarding low-quality cardiovascular system sound recordings by older users can be overcome.
One of the easiest solutions, he said, is for you to instruct your users to use an earpiece to listen to their own heart sounds while they search regarding the position with the loudest heart sounds.
Since hospitals already have several tools to evaluate the guts circumstances of patients, such as an echocardiogram (ECG) and
- heart failure patients
- post-operative follow-up involving patients along with valvular heart and soul disease
- post-operative follow-up of arrhythmia patients.
Dr. Lamata described the exact Echoes software as “a tool to help empower individual[s] to manage their own situations. ”
Dr . James Leiper , professor connected with molecular medicine at the University of Glasgow and Associate Medical Director in the British Heart Foundation, notes:
“As we enter the age of digital medicine, technologies like Echoes could revolutionize the diagnosis and at-home monitoring with heart ailments. Further research is needed to test how the iphone app can become used in tandem together with existing soul monitoring techniques. However, in case successful, this particular development can mark an important step towards having heart monitoring equipment at your fingertips. ”
Dr. Dominik Linz , professor within the physiology for circulation, kidney, and lung at the University about Copenhagen, pointed out that will it is important to get researchers in order to identify “specific thresholds pertaining to [heart sound measurements] which should result in action” simply by the cardiologist assessing the particular patient’s information via typically the Echoes software package.
One research limitation is that this Echoes app was only available meant for iPhone consumers, thus excluding Android people — who account designed for more than half in overall mobile phone users — from the study.
When asked when the Echoes app would become obtainable to the wider public, Dr. Pablo Lamata, told Medical News Today : “We are now planning our next release, to be able to also include an Android edition, hopefully by simply May next year. ”
The Echoes app currently only detects the S1 and S2 heart noises, and often the researchers commented that “the usefulness from recognizing pathological heart looks including S3, S4, and also murmurs, has to be investigated inside a future study involving patients. ”
The experts also noted that your study population may not reflect a truly general population “because smartphone users are likely younger and more educated. ” Further studies needed to measure the reproducibility of these results.