Development of an Intelligent PDA-based Wearable Digital Phonocardiograph.

Last year at the EMBC 2004 in San Francisco, we presented a paper entitled: "Digital Phonocardiography: a PDA-based Approach", which introduced the development of a PDA-based biomedical instrument capable of acquiring, processing, and analysis of heart sounds. In this paper we present a system, which is not only able to record and display the heart sounds in a Pocket PC but also apply several signal processing and statistical techniques to segment the these signals into four parts (the first heart sound, the systole, the second heart sound and the diastole) and implement feature extraction methods for classification purposes. Classification has been achieved using a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The system was used to classify a number of normal and abnormal heart sounds (normal, aortic regurgitation, aortic stenosis, mitral regurgitation and mitral stenosis) and validate the effectiveness of the statistical segmentation and the feature extraction methods in this environment.