The feasibility study of mobile-to-mobile communication for auscultation of heart sound and lung sound

This study presented to insert a small-scaled microphone of the ear-set of a smart mobile (Galaxy Beam, GT-I8530, SamsungTM) into an eartip of the stethoscope, the sound can be transmitted by the mobile when it dialed to another phone or mobile. In this study, we employed another smart phone (Windows Phone 8X, hTC TM) to be the receiver. The results were showed by time sequence signals as well as spectrograms which demonstrated the components of frequencies of the sounds. Surprisingly, the recorded sounds of subject´s mobile were much noisier than those of doctors´, because of the very advanced technology of mobile communication which included the auto gain control (AGC), digital filter, noise cancellation and amplifier technologies to improve the quality of communication. We believe that the mobile-to-mobile communication is feasible to be the mean of distant auscultation. The perspective on the filtering modes, we got the conclusions of the distant auscultation, i.e. lung sound is better than heart sound.