Auscultation of breathing sounds is a common practice since the antiquity. In 1819, Laënnec invented the stethoscope and published the first work on pulmonary disorders and their associated sounds. Since then, the auscultation was incorporated into medicine. The first electronic device to record and analyze physiological sounds was built in 1955, being followed by many other developments. In 2000, a task force of the European Respiratory Society established guidelines for computerized respiratory sound analysis (CORSA). Our work describes a low cost microcomputerized system, based on the CORSA guidelines, developed to acquire and record breathing sounds as well as respiratory flow waveforms. It consists of a four channel micro-controlled device that can simultaneously record sounds from three different sources and flow waveform. These signals are transmitted to a microcomputer running dedicated software that shows the waveforms on the screen and stores them into the hard disk. The developed device was tested in patients with heart failure, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, pneumonia and asthma. Examples of the registered signals and results of a qualitative assessment of the developed system are presented.
A description of the system used to record the waveforms is given in REF .
MICROCOMPUTERIZED RESPIRATORY SOUND RECORDER - A Low Cost Device
BIODEVICES
Engineering Computer Science