Your smartphone, your personal doctor! This is only the beginning of a deepening relationship between you and your smartphone.
It seems, the quality of the recordings is not yet fully convincing and needs further work and research.
Unfortunately, I could not find this app on the Google Play Store, but there are some other, similar apps available. Apparently, the app is only available for Apple iPhones.
"Smartphones are beginning to have a real influence on the way we manage our day-to-day health, and one area they may have a significant impact is in monitoring our hearts. A new study has demonstrated that an app designed to turn smartphones into electronic stethoscopes can capture reliable, quality recordings of user heartbeats ...
The Echoes app is designed to perform the role of a traditional stethoscope. Users simply place the phone’s microphone directly on their skin in a quiet environment, with an onscreen slider enabling them to tune the microphone’s sensitivity to ensure they capture their beating heart.
The app was launched last May and has since gathered more than 100,000 heart recordings. [so few recordings???] These are added to a database for scientists ... to analyze for sound quality and try to spot clinical markers of cardiac events.
In newly published research, the scientists assessed more than 7,500 recordings, along with data on users’ gender, age, body mass index (BMI) and phone hardware. While the team found that success rate of good recordings tended to decrease with user age, their gender, BMI or phone hardware did not alter the quality of the recordings. ..."
The Echoes app is designed to perform the role of a traditional stethoscope. Users simply place the phone’s microphone directly on their skin in a quiet environment, with an onscreen slider enabling them to tune the microphone’s sensitivity to ensure they capture their beating heart.
The app was launched last May and has since gathered more than 100,000 heart recordings. [so few recordings???] These are added to a database for scientists ... to analyze for sound quality and try to spot clinical markers of cardiac events.
In newly published research, the scientists assessed more than 7,500 recordings, along with data on users’ gender, age, body mass index (BMI) and phone hardware. While the team found that success rate of good recordings tended to decrease with user age, their gender, BMI or phone hardware did not alter the quality of the recordings. ..."
From the abstract:
"Aims
Smartphones are equipped with a high-quality microphone which may be used as an electronic stethoscope. We aim to investigate the factors influencing quality of heart sound recorded using a smartphone by non-medical users.
Methods and results
An app named Echoes was developed for recording heart sounds using iPhone. Information on phone version and users’ characteristics including sex, age, and body mass index (BMI) was collected. Heart sound quality was visually assessed and its relation to phone version and users’ characteristics was analysed. A total of 1148 users contributed to 7597 heart sound recordings. Over 80% of users were able to make at least one good-quality recording. Good-, unsure- and bad-quality recordings amounted to 5647 (74.6%), 466 (6.2%) and 1457 (19.2%), respectively. Most good recordings were collected in the first three attempts of the users. Phone version did not significantly change the users’ success rate of making a good recording, neither was sex in the first attempt (P = 0.41) or the first three attempts (P = 0.21). ...
Conclusion
Smartphone can be used by non-medical users to record heart sounds in good quality. Age may affect heart sound recording, but hardware, sex, and BMI do not alter the recording."
Smartphones show promise as electronic stethoscopes A mobile phone app which records a user’s heartbeat could pave the way for doctors to monitor cardiac patients remotely, new research suggests.
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