Cardiac Auscultation Simulator

Listening and then interpreting sounds produced by the body is important and usually the 1st step used by the doctors and nurses to evaluate a patient. Auscultation helps medical professionals in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. To learn the basic auscultation skills doctors and nurses are p

Project Title

Cardiac Auscultation Simulator

Project Area of Specialization

Augmented and Virtual Reality

Project Summary

Listening and then interpreting sounds produced by the body is important and usually the 1st step used by the doctors and nurses to evaluate a patient. Auscultation helps medical professionals in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. To learn the basic auscultation skills doctors and nurses are provided with auscultation training sessions. They usually listen to the normal and diseased heart sounds to differentiate between diseased and normal conditions. The basic auscultation training session involves the correct and exact placement of stethoscope onto the body and finally associating the observed sound with the appropriate pathophysiology and pathology. According to research almost 440,000 people lost their lives every year due to obviated medical errors. All these preventable medical errors are mainly caused due to lack of practice of medical students, doctors, and nurses. To reduce preventable medical errors and to improve the clinical practice of doctors and nurses Simulation-Based medical education (SBME) can be an effective technique. SBME is a rapidly evolving technology, used widely by the medical universities to improve patient safety. Unfortunately, SMBE is not delivered in most of the medical universities of Pakistan. So, keeping this issue in mind, we decided to design a CARDIAC AUSCULTATION SIMULATOR that is controlled by a simple mobile application. User friendly application enable users to learn fast. Our simulator is not designed to treat, cure or diagnose any disease, it a medical training device that will used to train the medical students about Cardiac Auscultation. It also helps medical students to learn the correct placement of stethoscope. Our simulator will also improve diagnostic skills of its users.

Project Objectives

• To design a simulator that can generate high-fidelity heart sounds.
• To design a medical training device that will be able to teach medical students about Cardiac Auscultation. 
• To help medical students in teaching them correct-placement of stethoscope.

Project Implementation Method

Project implementation involves four steps:

• The first and foremost step of our project is to collect the normal and diseased heart sounds. Heart sounds are collected from the internet. There are a lot of open source websites available that provides different heart sounds cases. So, we have downloaded the heart sounds from two websites.
• The second step is to design a good amplifier system. Amplifier system contains 6 amplifier circuits for each auscultation site.
• The third step is to design a user interface. For user interface we have designed a user-friendly android mobile application. The mobile application is designed on MIT APP INVENTOR and for interfacing our mobile application with the Arduino we have used Bluetooth module.
• The last step is to implement the whole system into the manikin. For that we need Silicon medical dummy available in the market but they are too costly, so for now temporarily we have used plastic dummy.

Benefits of the Project

• This project would help medical students to improve their diagnostic and Auscultatory skills.

• This device will enable them to listen maximum number of heart sounds related to cardiac diseases in a single body. This will save their time and efforts as to find patient of each disease is not possible and easy.
• Their diagnostic skills will also increase, and they are able to recognize different sounds only by listening easily.
• This project will also help medical students to learn the correct placement of stethoscope for listening different heart sounds at different positions of heart.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The Cardiac Auscultation Simulator consists of a mannequin which is well equipped with Bluetooth module to transmit data, an amplifier circuit for heart sound amplification, speakers on the specific areas and stethoscope is used for the real feel. The trainees can be trained efficiently since the whole environment is very close to reality.

 First, we must design a sound amplifier circuitry that can enhance the heart sounds. For that we have used TDA2822 Amplifier IC. The speakers are fitted on to the specified location on the manikin. Each speaker has its own amplifier system. Amplifier Circuits are operated via Arduino and Mobile application. Arduino is only used for switching the amplifier circuits. Digital pins of Arduino are used for this purpose.

Arduino and mobile application are connected via Bluetooth Module. As we have used mobile application for user interface, so whatever signal send from mobile application can be read via Rx pin of Arduino. In this way the command send via Rx pin of Arduino will be executed by Arduino.

Sounds are stored in the Application. Users can select any sound by their choice. By pressing any specified sound button, the sound will be played using the audio jack at a specific speaker.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Type of Industry

Education

Technologies

Augmented & Virtual Reality

Sustainable Development Goals

Quality Education

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com