Towards Remote Auscultation with Commodity Earphones

ABSTRACT

Virtual visits (a.k.a., telehealth) have been promoted in response to the COVID pandemic since early 2020. Despite its convenience, the current virtual visit practice barely relies on video observation and talking. The specialist, however, cannot accurately assess the patient's health condition by listening to acoustic cardiopulmonary signals emanating from the patient's heart with a stethoscope. In this poster, we explore the feasibility of remote auscultation in virtual visits settings by reusing the patient's earphones as a stethoscope. The proposed hardware-software system captures the minute heartbeats from the patient's ear canal. It then offloads these noisy cardiac signals to the pairing device (e.g., a smartphone or a laptop) to reconstruct fine-grained Phonocardiogram (PCG) signals. By listening to the reconstructed PCG signals, the specialist can easily assess the patient's health condition and make the most informed diagnosis. We describe the design challenges and explain our technical roadmap. © 2022 Owner/Author.