While the connected objects that accompany us on a daily basis are increasingly used to monitor our health, a researcher in biomedical engineering has created an iOS application that allows you to listen to your heart with impressive clarity.
It could help diagnose heart problems like heart failure, atrial fibrillation, or murmurs without even going to the doctor.
Listen to your heart with the microphone of the iPhone
Dubbed “Echoes”, the app was dreamed up by researcher Pablo Lamela of King’s College London with the initial intention of allowing people to listen to their own hearts. He then realized the advances that such a device could bring.
To use it, it is recommended that you sit in a quiet room, lean slightly forward and position your iPhone in four different places on your chest. Then the sound is transformed into a visual display so users can see and hear their heart sounds. Note that for now, Echoes is only available on iPhone, because the microphone of Apple mobiles is powerful enough to detect the sound emitted by the organ.
The sound quality of the recordings, which are anonymous, is then assessed by a team from King’s College and the University of Maastricht. Nevertheless, users must give information about their age, gender, height and weight in order to build a large-scale database that can be greatly useful for researchers in the medical field. Moreover, the results of the first 5,000 users have been published in a study.
Health is increasingly connected
For the time being, the application does not give a diagnosis, but the teams are thinking about changing it in this direction. However, they are concerned that this will affect people with anxiety disorders, who cannot help but constantly listen to their hearts.
Whatever happens to the platform in terms of diagnostics, the Echoes application demonstrates the growing interest of medicine in electronic devices. Moreover, Apple has created a whole device allowing its users to better monitor their health, and collaborates with major American institutes to enable them to carry out large-scale studies thanks to the data collected by the Apple Watch.
As a reminder, the connected watch from Apple is already capable of detecting a heart attack.
Source : New Scientist
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