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In this randomized study, use of alcohol-based hand-rub disinfection significantly reduced bacterial bioburden of stethoscopes in routine clinical use. Prior cleaning of stethoscopes on the study day did not affect baseline contamination rates, which suggests that the efficacy of alcohol disinfection is short-lived and may need to be repeated between patients.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has considerably changed the game in the field of hygiene. The aim of the study was to compare microbiological colonization present on the emergency physicians' stethoscopes and smartphones before and after the outbreak of COVID-19. This was a prospective cohort study in 1 academic hospitals' emergency department. A microbiological analysis was conducted on the emergency doctors' stethoscopes and smartphones for a month in 2018 and 2021. Analysis concerned stethoscopes diaphragms and the most used surface of the cellphones screen around to the main button. The authors used a solid growth medium irradiated Count-Tact® 3P agar (CT3P) (BioMerieux, Lyon, France) for collecting samples. Results were obtained after 5 days of growth at 30°C to collect all the saprophytes environmental flora. A total of 27 doctors were included in 2018 and 30 doctors in 2021. Stethoscope diaphragm contamination was very high in both period with a geometric mean (GM) without difference before and after COVID respectively, GM = 68 colony-forming unit (cfu) per 25 cm² (95% CI: 50-94 cfu/25 cm²) vs. 68 cfu/25 cm² (95% CI: 44-105 cfu/25 cm²), p > 0.05. Smartphones were cleaner than stethoscopes with a GM <50 cfu/25 cm² without significant difference between 2 periods, respectively GM = 45 cfu/25 cm² (95% CI: 34-59 cfu/25 cm²) vs. 31 cfu/25 cm² (95% CI: 20-48 cfu/25 cm²), p > 0.05. The study shows an urgent need to regularly inform of the hygiene of the medical tools and COVID-19 does not really bring improvements in the matter. Particularly in emergency department, where physicians examine several patients per day and can possibly transmit pathogens. Int J Occup Med Environ Health. 2025;38(6):611-20.

Sound and vibration analysis are prominent tools for machine health diagnosis. Especially, neural network (NN) strategies have focused on finding complex and nonlinear relationships between the sensor signal and the machine status to detect machine faults. However, it is difficult to collect enough amount of fault data as much as normal status data for training general NN models. To resolve the issue, this paper proposes the autoencoder-based anomaly detection framework for industrial robot arms using an internal sound sensor. The autoencoder uses signals in the normal state of the robots for training the model. It reconstructs the input signals as output, and anomalous states are found from high reconstruction error. Two stethoscopes were attached to the surface of the robot joint as sensors, and the sounds were recorded by USB microphone attached to the outlet of the stethoscopes. Features were extracted from STFT spectrogram images of the gathered sound, then used to train and test an autoencoder model. The reconstruction errors of the autoencoder were compared to distinguish the abnormal status from normal one. The experimental results suggest that the stethoscopes prevent the interference of noise, and the collected sound signals can be utilized for detecting machine anomalies.

Lung auscultation is an important part of a physical examination. However, its biggest drawback is its subjectivity. The results depend on the experience and ability of the doctor to perceive and distinguish pathologies in sounds heard via a stethoscope. This paper investigates a new method of automatic sound analysis based on neural networks (NNs), which has been implemented in a system that uses an electronic stethoscope for capturing respiratory sounds. It allows the detection of auscultatory sounds in four classes: wheezes, rhonchi, and fine and coarse crackles. In the blind test, a group of 522 auscultatory sounds from 50 pediatric patients were presented, and the results provided by a group of doctors and an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm developed by the authors were compared. The gathered data show that machine learning (ML)–based analysis is more efficient in detecting all four types of phenomena, which is reflected in high values of recall (also called as sensitivity) and F1-score.Conclusions: The obtained results suggest that the implementation of automatic sound analysis based on NNs can significantly improve the efficiency of this form of examination, leading to a minimization of the number of errors made in the interpretation of auscultation sounds.What is Known:• Auscultation performance of average physician is very low. AI solutions presented in scientific literature are based on small data bases with isolated pathological sounds (which are far from real recordings) and mainly on leave-one-out validation method thus they are not reliable.What is New:• AI learning process was based on thousands of signals from real patients and a reliable description of recordings was based on multiple validation by physicians and acoustician resulting in practical and statistical prove of AI high performance.

Most heart diseases are associated with and reflected by the sounds that the heart produces. Heart auscultation, defined as listening to the heart sound, has been a very important method for the early diagnosis of cardiac dysfunction. Traditional auscultation requires substantial clinical experience and good listening skills. The emergence of the electronic stethoscope has paved the way for a new field of computer-aided auscultation. This article provides an in-depth study of (1) the electronic stethoscope technology, and (2) the methodology for diagnosis of cardiac disorders based on computer-aided auscultation. The paper is based on a comprehensive review of (1) literature articles, (2) market (state-of-the-art) products, and (3) smartphone stethoscope apps. It covers in depth every key component of the computer-aided system with electronic stethoscope, from sensor design, front-end circuitry, denoising algorithm, heart sound segmentation, to the final machine learning techniques. Our intent is to provide an informative and illustrative presentation of the electronic stethoscope, which is valuable and beneficial to academics, researchers and engineers in the technical field, as well as to medical professionals to facilitate its use clinically. The paper provides the technological and medical basis for the development and commercialization of a real-time integrated heart sound detection, acquisition and quantification system.

Auscultation with stethoscope has been an essential tool for diagnosing the patients with respiratory disease. Although auscultation is non-invasive, rapid, and inexpensive, it has intrinsic limitations such as inter-listener variability and subjectivity, and the examination must be performed face-to-face. Conventional stethoscope could not record the respiratory sounds, so it was impossible to share the sounds. Recent innovative digital stethoscopes have overcome the limitations and enabled clinicians to store and share the sounds for education and discussion. In particular, the recordable stethoscope made it possible to analyze breathing sounds using artificial intelligence, especially based on neural network. Deep learning-based analysis with an automatic feature extractor and convoluted neural network classifier has been applied for the accurate analysis of respiratory sounds. In addition, the current advances in battery technology, embedded processors with low power consumption, and integrated sensors make possible the development of wearable and wireless stethoscopes, which can help to examine patients living in areas of a shortage of doctors or those who need isolation. There are still challenges to overcome, such as the analysis of complex and mixed respiratory sounds and noise filtering, but continuous research and technological development will facilitate the transition to a new era of a wearable and smart stethoscope.

(1) Background: Mastery of auscultation can be challenging for many healthcare providers. Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital support is emerging as an aid to assist with the interpretation of auscultated sounds. A few AI-augmented digital stethoscopes exist but none are dedicated to pediatrics. Our goal was to develop a digital auscultation platform for pediatric medicine. (2) Methods: We developed StethAid—a digital platform for artificial intelligence-assisted auscultation and telehealth in pediatrics—that consists of a wireless digital stethoscope, mobile applications, customized patient-provider portals, and deep learning algorithms. To validate the StethAid platform, we characterized our stethoscope and used the platform in two clinical applications: (1) Still’s murmur identification and (2) wheeze detection. The platform has been deployed in four children’s medical centers to build the first and largest pediatric cardiopulmonary datasets, to our knowledge. We have trained and tested deep-learning models using these datasets. (3) Results: The frequency response of the StethAid stethoscope was comparable to those of the commercially available Eko Core, Thinklabs One, and Littman 3200 stethoscopes. The labels provided by our expert physician offline were in concordance with the labels of providers at the bedside using their acoustic stethoscopes for 79.3% of lungs cases and 98.3% of heart cases. Our deep learning algorithms achieved high sensitivity and specificity for both Still’s murmur identification (sensitivity of 91.9% and specificity of 92.6%) and wheeze detection (sensitivity of 83.7% and specificity of 84.4%). (4) Conclusions: Our team has created a technically and clinically validated pediatric digital AI-enabled auscultation platform. Use of our platform could improve efficacy and efficiency of clinical care for pediatric patients, reduce parental anxiety, and result in cost savings.

With conventional stethoscopes, the auscultation results may vary from one doctor to another due to a decline in his/her hearing ability with age or his/her different professional training, and the problematic cardiopulmonary sound cannot be recorded for analysis. In this paper, to resolve the above-mentioned issues, an electronic stethoscope was developed consisting of a traditional stethoscope with a condenser microphone embedded in the head to collect cardiopulmonary sounds and an AI-based classifier for cardiopulmonary sounds was proposed. Different deployments of the microphone in the stethoscope head with amplification and filter circuits were explored and analyzed using fast Fourier transform (FFT) to evaluate the effects of noise reduction. After testing, the microphone placed in the stethoscope head surrounded by cork is found to have better noise reduction. For classifying normal (healthy) and abnormal (pathological) cardiopulmonary sounds, each sample of cardiopulmonary sound is first segmented into several small frames and then a principal component analysis is performed on each small frame. The difference signal is obtained by subtracting PCA from the original signal. MFCC (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients) and statistics are used for feature extraction based on the difference signal, and ensemble learning is used as the classifier. The final results are determined by voting based on the classification results of each small frame. After the testing, two distinct classifiers, one for heart sounds and one for lung sounds, are proposed. The best voting for heart sounds falls at 5–45% and the best voting for lung sounds falls at 5–65%. The best accuracy of 86.9%, sensitivity of 81.9%, specificity of 91.8%, and F1 score of 86.1% are obtained for heart sounds using 2 s frame segmentation with a 20% overlap, whereas the best accuracy of 73.3%, sensitivity of 66.7%, specificity of 80%, and F1 score of 71.5% are yielded for lung sounds using 5 s frame segmentation with a 50% overlap.

Electronic stethoscopes convert acoustic sound waves to electrical signals which can then be amplified and processed for optimal listening. However, amplification of stethoscope contact artifacts, and component cutoffs has led to the question of whether they are an improvement in the bedside cardiac examination. In this study, a single observer compared an analog stethoscope with the Thinklabsone electronic stethoscope in a clinical setting to determine if there was a significant difference in the diagnostic utility of the devices. Two hundred and nine patients were examined and the electronic stethoscope was felt to have superior sound quality in 65% of patients.

Cardiac and respiratory diseases are the primary causes of health problems. If we can automate anomalous heart and lung sound diagnosis, we can improve the early detection of disease and enable the screening of a wider population than possible with manual screening. We propose a lightweight yet powerful model for simultaneous lung and heart sound diagnosis, which is deployable in an embedded low-cost device and is valuable in remote areas or developing countries where Internet access may not be available. We trained and tested the proposed model with the ICBHI and the Yaseen datasets. The experimental results showed that our 11-class prediction model could achieve 99.94% accuracy, 99.84% precision, 99.89% specificity, 99.66% sensitivity, and 99.72% F1 score. We designed a digital stethoscope (around USD 5) and connected it to a low-cost, single-board-computer Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (around USD 20), on which our pretrained model can be smoothly run. This AI-empowered digital stethoscope is beneficial for anyone in the medical field, as it can automatically provide diagnostic results and produce digital audio records for further analysis.