Why the study?
Auscultation provides rich information for cardiac and respiratory medicine, but its use has been confined to clinical and highly controlled settings.
A novel chest-mounted wearable device can accurately monitor heart rate using body sounds with low power consumption, enabling continuous on-device monitoring.
Supports acoustic wearable feasibility for continuous HR; leaves open clinical validation and outcome studies.
Body sounds provide rich information about the state of the human body and can be useful in many medical applications. Auscultation, the practice of listening to body sounds, has been used for centuries in respiratory and cardiac medicine to diagnose or track disease progression. To date, however, its use has been confined to clinical and highly controlled settings. Our work addresses this limitation: we devise a chest-mounted wearable for continuous monitoring of body sounds, that leverages data processing algorithms that run on-device. We concentrate on the detection of heart sounds to perform heart rate monitoring. To improve robustness to ambient noise and motion artefacts, our device uses an algorithm that explicitly segments the collected audio into the phases of the cardiac cycle. Our study with 9 users demonstrates that it is possible to obtain heart rate estimates that are competitive with commercial devices, with low enough power consumption for continuous use.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Tailor et al. (2020) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: