A First Step Towards On-Device Monitoring of Body Sounds in the Wild
This work addresses the limitation of auscultation being confined to controlled environments, enabling continuous monitoring for medical applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing wearable and algorithmic concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of monitoring body sounds outside clinical settings by developing a chest-mounted wearable with on-device algorithms for heart sound detection, achieving heart rate estimates competitive with commercial monitors in a pilot study with 9 users.
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 pilot study with 9 users demonstrates that it is possible to obtain heart rate estimates that are competitive with commercial heart rate monitors, with low enough power consumption for continuous use.