Detection of Respiratory Crackle Sounds via an Android Smartphone-based System

Pulmonary auscultation with traditional stethoscope, although useful, has limitations for detecting discontinuous adventitious respiratory sounds (crackles) that commonly occur in respiratory diseases. In this work, we present the development of a mobile health system for the automated detection of crackle sounds, comprised by an acoustical sensor, a smart phone device, and a mobile application (app) implemented in Android. The app allows the physician to record, store, reproduce, and analyze respiratory sounds directly on the smart phone. The algorithm for crackle detection was based on a time-varying autoregressive modeling. Performance of the automated detector was analyzed using synthetic fine and coarse crackle sounds randomly added to the basal respiratory sounds acquired from healthy subjects with different signal to noise ratios. Accuracy and sensitivity were found to range from 90.7% to 94.0% and from 91.2% to 94.2%, respectively. Application of the proposed mobile system to real acquired data from a patient with pulmonary fibrosis is also exemplified.