Respiratory sound analysis using stethoscope continues to be the mostly used method for the diagnosis of respiratory diseases. This technique depends on detection of symptomatic adventitious sounds present with normal vesicular sounds. However, some factors such as dependence on the practitioner doctor’s experience, frequency distortion of the stethoscope and frequency response of the human ear...

Developing countries like India, where doctor to patient ratio is around 1:1700, as large number of population lives in villages and remotely located area. Health check-up of such a large population is very challenging for their government due to less number of qualified doctors, highly qualified doctor refuges to work in villages and remotely placed areas. This paper proposes a new idea by whi...

We assessed how often bedside stethoscopes in our intensive care unit were cleaned and whether they became colonised with potentially pathogenic bacteria. On two separate days the 12 nurses attending the bedspaces were questioned about frequency of stethoscope cleaning on the unit and the bedside stethoscopes were swabbed before and after cleaning to identify colonising organisms. Twenty-two he...

A fundamental problem associated with using the conventional electrocardiograph (ECG) to monitor a subject's cardiac activity during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the distortion of the ECG due to electromagnetic interference. This problem is particularly pronounced in MR microscopy (MRI of small animals at microscopic resolutions (< 0.03 mm(3))) because the strong, rapidly-switching magne...

In this paper, we present the use of stethoscope and silicon NAM microphones in automatic speech recognition. NAM microphones are special acoustic sensors, which are attached behind the talker’s ear and can capture not only normal (audible) speech, but also very quietly uttered speech (non-audible murmur). As a result, NAM microphones can be applied in automatic speech recognition systems when ...