Virtual Stethoscope

Inspiration

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, however many people do not have access to a cardiologist for regular checkups, due to lack of insurance, distance, or other reasons. The goal of Virtual Stethoscope is to expand access to preventative heart screenings. This is not designed to be diagnostic or replace seeing a health care provider, but rather to educate you on what a normal heart sounds like and when you might want to consider seeing a healthcare professional. We produce 3D printed stethoscopes provided at no cost for patients, and one of these stethoscopes can be requested using the link on the website.

What it does

Our web app comes with a 3D printed stethoscope, and together they educate patients on how to listen to their own heart sounds and provides an analytical report. The analysis is generated using the latest literature and statistics based on what's most likely.

How we built it

We combined the talents of our three team members-- Anna provided the medical information and 3D prototyping for the stethoscope, Eunice developed the website, and Hastings worked on the machine learning algorithm for analyzing heart sounds. Everything is built with the patient at the forefront.

Our code is public at https://github.com/HastingsGreer/temp_hearbeat_name

Challenges we ran into

There are multiple parts of this project that needed to connect to each other, but as is the nature of a weekend hackathon with a highly ambitious project, we didn't have time to fluidly connect everything, so there are still a couple parts that we need to optimize, mostly getting the inputs/outputs for each step to line up.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A machine learning algorithm that can analyze a heart sound from a phone recording!
R code that uses statistics and personal demographics to diagnose heart valvular diseases in an open-source format that is easily understandable to patients
A functional website that can take inputs!
An educational blurb on how the heart works and how to listen to your own heart
A 3D print-able stethoscope diaphragm created on SolidWorks

What we learned

We learned how the heart works, how to build a website, and how to communicate with patients, among so many other things. Also soft skills like teamwork, communication, and how to blend talents on a diverse team.