By Stevie Smith Sep 20, 2007, 13:40 GMT
An interesting medical story has this week shown that the significant advances of portable digital entertainment technology are not simply limited to the obvious advantages of listening to music and watching movies on the go.
epa01103336 With the advancement of digital technology for the consumer electronics market comes potential advancement for the world of medicine as a team of Canadian researchers look to replace the stethoscope with an MP3 player. EPA/STR
Specifically, a research team based at the University of Alberta in Canada is examining the possibilities of utilising MP3 player hardware to replace the doctor’s medical mink, the age-old stalwart stethoscope.
The long-serving stethoscope, invented in France back in1816, is considered to be somewhat of a hit-and-miss medical instrument in the face of today’s wealth of advanced equipment, reports the Canadian Press. And that has led to respirologist Dr. Neil Skjodt, and audiologist Bill Hodgetts to embark on an experiment to imbue MP3 players with in-built microphones to see if they are capable of obtaining better quality sounds from a patient’s lungs.
"The quality, clarity and purity of the loud sounds were better than I have ever heard with a stethoscope," commented Dr. Skjodt, who yesterday presented the study’s preliminary findings at Stockholm’s annual Congress of the European Respiratory Society.
With stethoscope sounds considered difficult to discern, even with the appropriate level of experience and training, the research team presented MP3-recorded lung sounds to respiratory specialist trainees to see whether they could gather stronger results over traditional stethoscopes.
Dr. Skjodt returned that the MP3 recordings assisted the trainees in more clearly discerning common combinations of breath sounds and wheezing than when utilising a stethoscope, although other less obvious noises and sounds were still somewhat difficult to accurately identify.
Citing the potential benefits of MP3-based stethoscopes, Dr. Skjodt offered that sounds could be recorded and filed indefinitely for later medical comparisons if necessary, while the MP3 format could be easily transferred digitally over the Internet so that other members of the medical community are able to offer their assistance remotely.
As well as its obvious ‘on-call’ functionality, Skjodt and Hodgetts offer that the technology, if successfully developed, could be used for providing practitioners with an audio library of sounds for educational reference. They also hope that doctors could use any resultant devices to help gather and analyse heart and bowel sounds.
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