Patent ID: 7551962

Claim:
A system comprising: an external device; and an implantable medical device (IMD) comprising: a pulse generator configured to provide at least one of pacing therapy pulses, cardioversion shock pulses, or defibrillation shock pulses to a heart; an acoustic transducer configured to receive acoustic energy from within a patient's body and generating electrical audio signals in accordance therewith; sampling circuitry and an analog-to-digital converter configured to produce digitized samples of a signal received from the acoustic transducer; speech recognition circuitry configured to extract a voice command from the digitized samples; circuitry configured to begin storing, in response to the voice command, a plurality of samples of the digitized acoustic signals including voice sounds in a storage medium; and a communication circuit operable to communicate with the external device, the communication circuit for communicating the recorded samples to the external device.