Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
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A reported 30% of people worldwide have abnormal lung sounds, including crackles, rhonchi, and wheezes. To date, the traditional stethoscope remains the most popular tool used by physicians to diagnose such abnormal lung sounds, however, many problems arise with the use of a stethoscope, including the effects of environmental noise, the inability to record and store lung sounds for follow-up or tracking, and the physician's subjective diagnostic experience. This study has developed a digital stethoscope to help physicians overcome these problems when diagnosing abnormal lung sounds. ⋯ The respiratory signal extracted by the bend sensors can be transmitted to the computer via Bluetooth to calculate the respiratory cycle, for real-time assessment. If an abnormal status is detected, the device will warn the user automatically. Experimental results indicated that the error in respiratory cycles between measured and actual values was only 6.8%, illustrating the potential of our detector for home care applications.
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Smartphones have been widely used recently to monitor heart rate and activity, since they have the necessary processing power, non-invasive and cost-effective sensors, and wireless communication capabilities. Consequently, healthcare applications (apps) using smartphone-based sensors have been highlighted for non-invasive physiological monitoring. In addition, several healthcare apps have received FDA clearance. ⋯ In this paper, we describe the experience of using smartphone apps with sensors in a large medical center in Korea. Among >20 apps developed in our medical center, four were extensively analyzed ("My Cancer Diary", "Point-of-Care HIV Check", "Blood Culture" and "mAMIS"), since they use smartphone-based sensors such as the camera and barcode reader to enter data into the electronic health record system. By analyzing the usage patterns of these apps for data entry with sensors, the current limitations of smartphone-based sensors in a clinical setting, hurdles against adoption in the medical center, benefits of smartphone-based sensors and potential future research directions could be evaluated.