A Real-Time Heart Rate Signal Detection using an Electronic Stethoscope with Labview

Abstract

Better accurate stethoscope measurements have been needed to diagnose heart problems earlier, monitor patients, and provide initial clinical data for physicians. This study aims to evaluate an electronic stethoscope for automatic identification of heart rate by monitoring Beats Per Minute (BPM) in real-time. In this work, a new design with a low cost electronic stethoscope is designed and implemented as a simple circuit for a replacement with conventional stethoscopes. This presented a low cost stethoscopes consisting of a preamplifier, low-pass filter, high-pass filter, microcontroller and Bluetooth. This simulation and experimental study was carried out for electronic circuit design testing. The condenser microphone transmited the signal into the signal conditioning circuit, and amplified it from 10 to 30 times. The low- and high- pass filter circuit was with cutoffs of 180 Hz and 50 Hz, respectively. The result shows that the fourth-order Butterworth filter was the best filter, with a gain of 0.707 Volt, -3.01 dB, and 0.782 Volt, -2.137 dB, respectively. The real-time measurements using the system are not significantly different from the manual measurements, with around 2-5%, with a delay of 1.7 to 2 seconds. The results indicated that an electronic stethoscope system could provide suitable information for BPM value and could display heart sound signals.

Keywords

• heart instrumentation
• filter
• heart rate
• real-time
• heart sounds
• stethoscopes