Thinklabs stethoscopes enable you to record heart sounds or lung sounds on many recording platforms. Now you can capture any interesting sounds on the fly, share it around the bedside or send it via email or messaging apps.

Applications

Clinical Practice - Capture auscultation sounds and incorporate them into your Electronic Medical Records (EMR). This is useful for tracking a patient's progress so that heart or lung sounds can be compared with previous visits. Physicians have used this to determine whether drug dosages need to be adjusted, whether patients have improved or regressed, etc. You can also email recordings to colleagues for second opinions.

Academic Teaching - Collect interesting sounds or build sound libraries for teaching. The quality of recordings with One is vastly superior to the typical audio materials used to teach auscultation. Now you can create sound sets specific to your own teaching curriculum. Sounds can be distributed to students via email, posted on websites or university intranets, uploaded to cloud servers such as Dropbox or Soundcloud. Studies have shown that students who listen repetitively to auscultation sounds improve their recognition rates from 30% to almost 90%.

Student Evaluations - Record specific sounds and incorporate them into the patient record when developing standardized patient cases or examination materials. One medical school has reported equipping students with Thinklabs stethoscopes and recorders and required students to record the sounds they hear on rounds. Examiners then listen to the recordings to compare them with findings claimed by the students.

Learning - Fellows, Residents and Medical Students can record sounds for presentation, journal clubs, and second opinions. Now a student, upon hearing something suspicious or interesting, can later consult with mentors to verify findings. This significantly enhances learning opportunities.

Presentations, Documentation, Journal Articles - Thinklabs Phonocardiography and spectrogram software allows you to upload recordings, display, edit and annotate them. The combination of Stethoscope and Software is an example of Thinklabs System Solution in action - the synergy that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

What You Need

Record using the Thinklink which is included with your One. It connects to almost any recording device including iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Mac or PC.

You can also use professional recording devices such as Tascam or Zoom semi-professional recorders. We do not recommend most dictation recorders since the audio quality is inadequate.

Macbooks do a good job of recording, however PC platform products are less predictable. Some have good audio quality, others do not. You can always add an external USB audio interface such as Asus Xonar or other higher quality audio peripheral.

Above all, keep in mind that recording quality is dependent on the device with which you record. Heart sounds can be challenging to many lower quality recording systems. However, you can also filter and post-process recordings where quality is important, such as compiling educational recordings. Contact Clive Smith at Thinklabs - he has advised everyone from CBS Sports to Johns Hopkins to creative artists on body sound recording.