Digital Stethoscope

Whatever the technical progress produced in the area of medicine, the stethoscope has, for the large part, stayed unchanged. Silicon Valley startup Eko Devices, nevertheless, looks to change that in a big way by introducing its take on the electronic stethoscope, reports The Washington Post.

Called Eko Core, this small gizmo attaches to your typical stethoscope, letting you record the sounds of a patient’s heart and have those sounds carried to the Eko iPhone and iPad program through Bluetooth 4.0. You’ve got the option of purchasing either the Eko Core itself for $200 or Eko’s own $300 stethoscope, including the Eko Core already attached to your stethoscope. No matter which path you take, the Eko app comes contained.

Such technology opens up a slew of chances for not only physicians who would like to offer high quality, low cost care for patients, but additionally for teachers who wish to offer their students access to your library of recorded heart sounds as a way to sharpen their auscultation abilities, which would be the abilities that enable individuals to correctly listen to internal sounds of your body.

Additionally, Eko Core allows for clinicians to consult and diagnose from a space when not in the office, thereby alleviating patients of the debilitating choice of either jumping work so that you can get the consult or not going in at all. That is very critical in rural areas, removing not only travel time, but the cash it will take to reach the consultation.

“If we are able to bring the specialist cardiologists from Johns Hopkins to the individual in rural Nebraska or a rural hamlet in India, that opens up the ability to save lives,” said Eko Devices chief operating officer Jason Bellet. “What we are seeing together with the age of telemedicine is now we are able to have a heart sound from a rural, underserved community and send that to a cardiologist for an instant second opinion.”

Eko might not be the very first firm to introduce an electronic stethoscope to the world of medicine, but it’s the very first firm to get its program recognized as HIPAA-compliant, in addition to possess the program incorporated to the electronic health record. Contextually, HIPAA, or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, gave American employees as well as their families the capacity to transfer and continue health insurance plan when they either lost or altered their occupations.

Ultimately, Eko needs to make use of Eko Core as a catalyst for even more promising things in the future, including the aptitude recognize heart conditions throughout using an algorithm.

“Our target would be to possess the physician place the stethoscope on the patient’s torso, click examine much as you’d click identify a tune inside the Shazam program, and have it say it is a midsystolic ejection murmur,” said Bellet.

 

News from: digitaltrends.com