Digital Stethoscope

Hi there, so for this week's blogpost, we are to think about our audience while presenting our project considering the key points below.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Who can be part of the Mboalab community?
• What is the project about?
• What problem is it trying to solve?
• How does the project fits into the community.
• What excites me about this project?
• What confused me about this project?
• What I have learnt for the past month.
• Connnect.

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Introduction.

Hello there, I am working on improving a digital stethoscope application at Mboalab, Yaoundé-Cameroon for the Outreachy internship. This organization is a medical facility which embeds technology in its projects to provide community and lifelong education for the general public. Their main goal is to facilitate access to basic health care using the technology of telemedicine, that is, remotely diagnosing and facilitating treatment of patients by using technology.

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Who can be part of the Mboalab community?.

If you love solving community problems in areas of healthcare and education, then Mboalab community is a great fit for you. They are committed to serving as a platform to propose solutions that meet the needs of the community and hence, the purpose for the open source wireless 3D printed digital stethoscope project.

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What is the project about?

So, what is a stethoscope? It is simply a device that converts sound waves to digital or electric waves. So, any ailment or disease that is sound related, the stethoscope is an inevitable tool. Also, most people perceive the stethoscope as a sign of the medical profession, like a chalk to a teacher or a voltage tester to an electrical engineer, cool right? 😉.
So medical practitioners use the stethoscope to listen to sounds from the heart, or lungs to do further diagnosis of diseases. A normal or abnormal sound could signify one or two disease-related issues (P.S: I am not a doctor).

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What problem is it trying to solve?

Now, modern stethoscopes are very costly, and this pose a major problem especially in low and middle income countries where few can afford. Also, the contact and sharing of stethoscopes can result in cross-contamination as someone touches the stethoscope. Having said all that, the problem this project is solving is to limit the contact of medical practitioners with patients, and enable remote utilization of a stethoscope by literally any android phone user.

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How does the project fits in to the community?

Given the affordability of an android phone, this will be a very helpful tool to the common man.
Also, the heart is the most vital organ of the body, as such everyone will eventually use the digital stethoscope, so to send in heartbeats into the system, and get feedback if it is normal or not, hence facilitating diagnosing and subsequently, better health care. The stethoscope also record the sound of the lungs of the users.

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What excites me about this project?

I am so excited being a part of this project given my curiosity in consultations and how to diagnose someone with the normality of his/her heartbeat, or lung sound. I will install the application and use it so often on everyone around me, even those who can not afford an android phone.

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What confused me about the project?

To say what confused me the most was the misconception that we were building an application for doctors only. I was then clarified by my mentors, so I will basically explain what the application does.

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What I have learnt for the past month?

To answer my clarity about the project, I will just give the basic functionality. So,

1. A user installs and launches the application
2. Connect a Bluetooth noise cancelling headset (earphones, airpods call it whichever)
3. Press and hold the record button
4. Place his/her/their device microphone unto the heart (for a heartbeat) or breathe into the microphone (for a lung sound)
5. Record, edit and send the recorded sound into the system.
6. Our AI model then analyzes the sound
7. Sends feedback to indicate normality of the sound. The application also provides insight (blogposts) on health related articles and about the Mboalab community.

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Connect.

Join the Mboalab community on linkedIn, twitter, facebook and youtube. Feel free to check out the following related communities such as open life science, open bioeconomy lab, afica open science and hardware. If you have further questions, feel free to reach our amazing mentors here. let's connect here too.