Stethoscope

The stethoscope was invented in 1816 by Rene Laennec to avoid having to place his ear to a woman's chest to listen to her heart. Improvements were made in terms of convenience, by adding tubing instead of using a solid wooden trumpet design, but the stehoscope has not changed much since it was invented.

Today, electronic stethoscopes are becoming more common, gradually supplanting the conventional stethoscope. The electronic stethoscope provides amplification and filtering, and facilitates connection to external devices for recording and transmitting heart and lung sounds. This is convenient for record-keeping of auscultation findings, and for remote auscultation of heart sounds and lung sounds.

An example of a modern electronic stethoscope with such a connection is the Thinklabs ds32a stethoscope. This device can connect to laptop computers, as well as iPods and other recorders. By connecting a stethoscope to a laptop or notebook computer, and transmitting sounds, clinics can be set up im remote places for examination of children by a pediatric cardiologist to differentiate between innocent and pathological murmurs.

External links

• stethoscopeThinklabs electronic stethoscope for connection to laptop computers.
• World Stethoscope A universal appliance to get real-time environment data into Etoys. The original World Stethoscope converts sensor data into sound which is read via a computer's microphone input (hence the name). We intend to use the World Stethoscope's Etoy user interface with the OLPC XO's AD-converter directly.