High-Performance Digital Filters in an Electronic Stethoscope: An FPGA Based Approach

In the medical world, stethoscopes are an indispensable diagnostic tool. The stethoscope can be used to listen to lung sounds in addition to heart sounds to detect heart-related disorders and assess whether there are any abnormalities in the lungs. The stethoscope should enable rapid and precise diagnosis of respiratory conditions. Making use of electronic technology, such as a digital stethoscope, allows for this modification of the conventional stethoscope. To remove the background noise (speech from hospital) and the physical motion of a patient and to allow the circulatory/respiratory sounds, digital filters are used with pipelining and look-ahead techniques. Our goal is to assess the performance of digital filters for noise reduction and signal enhancement in an electronic stethoscope. The filter circuits were synthesized on an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA EP4CE115F29C7 using Quartus II software v13.1 tool. The synthesized filter requires 1032 logic elements with a speed of 393.55 MHz. Also, the proposed filter consumes 177.87 mW.