Moto: To make health sensing Non-contactPurpose and
Objective: In the post covid era, non-invasive methods of diagnosis are not sufficient and non-contact methods are required for the safety of patients and medical professionals. Elderly people are the most affected because of the contact nature of primary diagnosis devices like stethoscopes. Contact stethoscopes have also been found to be dangerous in ICU, cases of burn, neonatal care etc. One of the reports suggests 92% of stethoscopes used in ICU have been infected with microbes.
Trachealth Technologies plans to develop a non-contact phono-cardiology instrument which can be used to remotely measure the heart sounds and these sounds can be digitised and transmitted to a remote physician for diagnosis. The objective is to develop a non-contact phono-cardiology instrument capable of measuring heart sounds which include heart beats and heart murmurs.
The heart sounds are typically very weak and difficult to hear in the presence of large interfering noise sources from the neighbouring environment. In an ultra-low noise acoustic anechoic chambers heart beats can be heard. These sounds also produce vibrations on the skin when the heartbeat is generated.
The proposed system uses two different techniques simultaneously which when suitably combined can detect heart sounds. Proposed system uses a 3-dimensional array of microphones along with a laser speckle interferometer. The microphone array in combination can produce a sensitivity equal to 0 dBSPL which is sufficient to hear heart beats. The blind source separation and beamforming algorithms will be used to eliminate the interference from other noise sources.