Session S44.3

ODySSY: An on-Demand Stethoscope System for Remote Auscultation

T Syeda-Mahmood*, N Mahmood, T Zimmerman, S Oakley,
G Carraro, N Bhatnagar

IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose, CA, USA

With the rising cost of healthcare of chronically ill patients, more and more healthcare providers are looking for solutions in which important patient data can be collected in a remote fashion while the patients remain at home. An important data that is not yet possible to monitor remotely is auscultation data. In general, augmenting patient records with auscultation sounds would aid in better chronic care managements of patients as comparative analysis can be done with their recordings over time.
In this paper we address the problem of automatic capture, view and analysis of auscultation exams as an important diagnostic component of a patient’s care. Specifically, we describe an on-demand stethoscope system (ODySSY) for relay of auscultation sounds recorded by stethoscopes to remote servers through 802.11 wireless networks. The system also offers easy ingest of sound data into electronic medical record systems (EMR) and remote viewing and listening of auscultation sounds through web portals. The key invention that enables wireless transmission of auscultation data from digital stethoscopes is a wireless transmitter box that collects audio data from the stethoscope, encodes the signal and transmits over the internet as TCP packets. A sound server on the internet receives auscultation data and adds it to the patient’s electronic record, and enables browser-based access. The user interface also allowed physicians to manually separate the heart sounds from the background noise/conversation as well as to add diagnostic annotations.
The utility of the ODySSy system was evaluated using three measures (a) system reliability (b) accuracy of sound recordings (b) ease-of-use and aid to diagnostic decision support. For this the system reliability, we operated the device as a continuous running demo in conferences (EB showcase, IEEE RACE conference, RSNA, HIMSS), and of the 600 people who used the device, we were able to collect the data for 578 people. The recording could not be made in some cases due to power limitations, interference in the presence of too many wireless networks (e.g. in trade shows). To test the validity of the recordings, 250 patient sound recordings were initially made in a controlled physician office experiment. The data obtained from the EMR was also viewed in a web browser on a laptop provided for the physician. Of the 250 recordings made by the physicians, 232 of them were found to be valid recordings as annotated by physicians. The remaining recordings indicated reception problems or recordings the physicians did not choose to annotate.
To our knowledge, this is the first system to enable remote auscultation and instantaneous viewing of such exams over the internet, thus advancing the state-of-the-art in the practice of cardiovascular medicine.

(Abstract Control Number: 244)