New 3D-printed digital Stethogram, a low-cost stethoscope and app

A low-cost 3D printed digital stethoscope that interfaces with a smart phone, called a "Stethogram" by two BYU professors who created it, is providing health care workers with a stethoscope that can be used safely with patients in isolation, and in telemedicine applications around the world. For more than a year, ER nurse Craig Nuttall, an associate professor of nursing at Brigham Young University, had been working on a low-cost 3D printed stethoscope design with BYU information technology associate professor Chia-Chi Teng and students from BYU's Fulton College of Engineering. When the COVID pandemic hit Utah, Nuttall noticed that personal protective equipment like face shields and coveralls made it difficult to assess patients with a traditional stethoscope. The Stethogram they designed is ideal for working with patients in isolation since it allows a nurse or physician to listen to a patient's heart and lungs by streaming audio from a smart phone to ear buds.

By outfitting a 3D printed stethoscope bell with an inexpensive gaming-style microphone and plugging it into an smart-phone, the user can either live-stream a sound file (from a patient's heart or lungs) via Bluetooth to a pair of ear buds, or save the sound file to send to a physician. The BYU professors have made the 3D printing and assembly instructions available free of charge on GitHub. The design includes four small 3D printed parts and instructions on other easily sourced parts for a user to assemble the stethoscope. The cost of printing the parts and purchasing tubing, gaming microphone, and audio cable, is estimated at around $20. The diaphragm piece, a thin circle of plastic that functions "like an ear drum," says Nuttall, is actually cut from a plastic file folder commonly found at office supply stores.

The BYU-designed Stethogram is a digital adaptation of another open-source stethoscope (the GliaX) which was designed by Tarek Loubani, founder of the Glia humanitarian project. Both 3D printable projects were originally designed to help health care providers in parts of the world where medical equipment is unavailable.

Free instructions on how to build the Stethogram, BYU’s 3D printed digital stethoscope, are available on GitHub: https://github.com/ccteng/Stethogram

The accompanying Stethogram app iPhone is available on TestFlight
https://testflight.apple.com/join/yx0PVjsa

Special thanks to students and faculty from the BYU College of Nursing and
the BYU Fulton College of Engineering for their support of the Stethogram project.

Se full story on BYU News: https://news.byu.edu/intellect/byu-profs-design-bluetooth-stethoscope-with-a-50-foot-range-to-help-healthcare-practitioners-stay-safe

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