Automatic Auscultation Utilizing Electronic Stethoscope for Early Discovery of Cardiac Diseases

Abstract

A novel embedded system was designed for early detection of cardiac diseases using electronic stethoscope. Phono cardiogram (PCG) signalwas used to detect cardiac diseases as it contains very useful information about the condition of heart. Phono cardio gram signal was recorded using electronic stethoscope which reacts to the sound waves indistinguishably to the customary acoustic stethoscope, which is then given to hardware circuitry for signal processing such as amplification and filtering of noises and to amicrocontroller. A software was developed to classify the heart sounds as normal and abnormal and extracting some important vital parameters such as total power, Q factor, time duration of first heart sound (t1), time duration between first and second heart sound (t12) and mean 12 from recorded phono cardiogram signal for finding  the cardiac condition. The proposed method is cost effective as itneeds minimal equipmentand it utilizes as it were 5 highlights for heart sounds classification comparedto existing technology which are employing a more noteworthy number of highlights.