Collecting, storing and transmitting heart sounds.

We have developed a system whereby heart sounds and accompanying electrocardiogram may be recorded in digital format, stored as files and transmitted as any other digital file. The present system is implemented on a Macintosh System 7.1 platform, but will run under System 7.0 to System 7.5. The code is written in object oriented C++. The data are presently taken using a standard heart sound microphone and ECG amplifier. The data collection program stores the sampled channels as 16 bit words. Each channel is sampled at 2 kb/s for periods of time ranging from 10 to 30 seconds. Our program then reads the file, displays it under a viewer and allows for high fidelity reproduction of the sounds.