Arduino Based Cost-Effective Design and Development of a Digital Stethoscope

The medical device used for auscultation is known as a stethoscope. An ordinary acoustics-based stethoscope is limited in its ability to provide high-quality sound in noisy environments. To deal with this problem digital stethoscopes have been developed. A digital stethoscope enables the use of advanced noise cancellation techniques resulting in high- quality sound compared to a conventional stethoscope. Currently, conventional stethoscopes are commonly used by physicians due to their low cost compared to the digital ones. This paper presents an Arduino DUE based cost-effective digital stethoscope with real-time realization of cardiac sounds over a graphic display and logging capabilities for post-processing in powerful numerical software such as MATLAB. The proposed design is considerably low-cost compared to the commercially available digital stethoscopes while providing $2.375 \pm 0.222$ dB better signal-to-noise ratio.