Advancements of Electronic Stethoscope: A Review

Abstract

Auscultation is one of the most popular methods of disease diagnosis and stethoscope has been an integral device of medical examination as it is used to listen to internal body sounds. But it inherits many limitations in traditional conventional stethoscope. Hence, an electronic stethoscope provides a much more advanced and modern solution for those limitations, and it increases the accuracy of different internal body sound recognition, assisting medical professionals to make a proper disease diagnosis. Despite the conventional stethoscope, electronic stethoscope amplifies the auscultation sound captured at the chest piece and converts it to an electrical signal which is then transmitted through an advanced designed circuitry to apply further signal processing techniques. The main objective of this review is to analyse the evaluation of medical stethoscope and the advancements that have been done using modern technology to improve electronic stethoscope by adding various features including noise reduction techniques and real time visualization techniques. Further, the paper discusses how wireless data transmission techniques have been included in electronic stethoscope, making it is possible to provide graphical analysis of the sound signal and the advanced mathematical techniques applied to make denoising and feature extraction process in an accurate way. It further reviews the alternations and modifications that have been possible due to electronic stethoscope enhancing the quality of healthcare sector.