Wearable computer

Computer science

Auscultation

Engineering

Speech recognition

Medicine

Embedded system

Operations management

Continuous monitoring

Medical diagnosis

Radiology

Stethoscope

Science Advances

Modern auscultation, using digital stethoscopes, provides a better solution than conventional methods in sound recording and visualization. However, current digital stethoscopes are too bulky and nonconformal to the skin for continuous auscultation. Moreover, motion artifacts from the rigidity cause friction noise, leading to inaccurate diagnoses. Here, we report a class of technologies that offers real-time, wireless, continuous auscultation using a soft wearable system as a quantitative disease diagnosis tool for various diseases. The soft device can detect continuous cardiopulmonary sounds with minimal noise and classify real-time signal abnormalities. A clinical study with multiple patients and control subjects captures the unique advantage of the wearable auscultation method with embedded machine learning for automated diagnoses of four types of lung diseases: crackle, wheeze, stridor, and rhonchi, with a 95% accuracy. The soft system also demonstrates the potential for a sleep study by detecting disorde...

Fully portable continuous real-time auscultation with a soft wearable stethoscope designed for automated disease diagnosis