An Improved Electronic Esophageal Stethoscope using Sound and Pressure Sensors

Esophageal stethoscope is used for monitoring the heart sounds and breath sounds of patients during surgery under a general anesthesia. Recently, an electronic esophageal stethoscope (EES)(1) has been developed for the purpose of real-time monitoring these information visually. This system uses only a microphone as the sound sensor. A drawback of the EES system is that it may be difficult to distinguish the first sound ( ) and the second sound ( ) of heart, because their periods are irregular depending on patients. In this paper, we propose an improved EES system in which the infrasound is measured by adding a pressure sensor as well as a sound sensor. We investigate some correlations between the infrasound and characteristics of the heart sound. The proposed system has been tested on 15 patients. The results show that the new system is capable of detecting the first sound more reliably and easily determining the heart rate and breathing period.