Labview based bowel-sounds monitoring system in realtime

For the patient who just underwent a major operation after general anesthesia, the gastrointestine recovery would take several hours. Therefore, evaluation of bowel-sounds (BS) plays an important role to know when the patient can begin to take food. The objective of our work is to offer a usable BS monitoring system in real-time instead of a doctor´s auscultation in the midst of pressing affairs. This report describes the performance of using a unidirectional microphone to detect BS in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen. In this paper, a measuring method based on the Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) techniques is proposed. We successfully eliminate the interference of the noise sources, which include of cardiac and pulmonary sounds, by means of filtering techniques. The experimental design was of using a stethoscope joined to a unidirectional microphone, and then using a data-acquisition (DAQ) interface to obtain the measured data via the LabVIEW software on a PC. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of using digital infinite impulse responses (IIR) filter for processing signals in measuring BS real-time. We suggest that the designed system could make to being a portable device while we combine a ZigBee module with it for the purpose of wireless monitoring.