Digital Stethoscope

Dhaval Shah
Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering Department, Sardar Patel Institute of Technology University of Mumbai, Mumbai 400058, India

Harshal Nishar
Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering Department, Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, University of Mumbai, Mumbai 400058, India

Satish Phulmali
Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering Department. Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, University of Mumbai, Mumbai 400058, India

AbstractStethoscope has been used since long time by healthcare professionals to listen the heart sounds for diagnostic purpose. Its major disadvantage is that some times it becomes difcult to listen it clearly. It would be advantageous to record and display the cardiac sound which can be used to study later. In this project we are converting acoustic sound into equivalent electric voltage which is amplied to sufcient amount. With the help of micro-controller electric voltage is digitalized. This cardiac sound waveform is displayed as graph with the help of Graphic LCD which is interfaced with micro-controller. Further heart beat rate is calculated and displayed on GLCD. Hence this digital stethoscope becomes very useful instrument for physicians to diagnose disease as well as study and compare various types of cardiac sound.

Fig. 1.

Block Diagram.

I. I NTRODUCTION Our project is a digital stethoscope [1] that displays your heartbeat on graphics LCD. It also calculates beats per minute and displays it on GLCD. Main motivation behind this project is the fact that we can not store heart beat by using simple stethoscope. It becomes helpful if we can store it and display it so that we can refer it whenever we want. Further it becomes easy to accurately measure beat rate. At the highest level, the design of our project centres around an acquisition circuit, data processing in a microcontroller and the output on a GLCD. The rst part of the stethoscope is the acquisition unit, which consists of an actual stethoscope mated with a microphone, and an amplier circuit. The microphone captures the audible signal from the body that is acoustically amplied by the stethoscope.After that, we bias and set the gain of the signal using an operational amplier so that the ADC on the microcontroller will be able to pick up the signal. The analog data is sampled by the microcontroller at a rate appropriate for display on GLCD. By detecting peaks in heart beat we calculate beat rate using timer of microcontroller. The block diagram of our project is as shown in Fig.1. II. HARDWARE DESCRIPTION Hardware of our project consists of a Condenser microphone as transducer, Opamp LM358 for amplier and lowpass lter, Atmega32 microcontroller, ADC and timer of microcontroller and a graphic LCD JHD12864 [2].

A. Transducer and amplier The rst part of our circuit is the stethoscope itself. Stethoscope is an acoustic amplier which amplies the heart beat and cardiac sound to audible level. Sound waves from the acoustic amplier (diaphragm) are fed to the condenser microphone. Sound waves hitting the condenser microphone change its capacitance by changing its impedance, which produces the voltage swing proportional to input sound waves thus it is used to convert heart beat from stethoscope in electric form. Microphone requires 5V biasing voltage which is given using pull-up resistor as shown in Fig. 2. The value of the pull-upresistor is very important. If it is too low, charge equalizations are done very fast so that the amplitude of the dynamic part gets lower - the sound will be smooth; if it is too high, the effect will be contrary resulting in a sharp sound. Value of pull-up resistor is selected to be 22k . As the output of microphone is very small, we are using single stage non-inverting Opamp amplier. Since only the dynamic part of the signal should be transferred to our amplier, coupling capacitance (AC-coupling) is used. Using potential divider operating point is shifted to mid point. This procedure moves the static part of our sound signal to 2.5V, the centre of our voltage supply, and allows using the 5V as a symmetrical voltage supply for our Opamp. To take only little energy from the weak input signal, a high value of resistance is connected between the operating voltage of 2.5V and the input of the amplier.

Fig. 2.

Condenser Microphone Biasing.

Output of microphone is around 250 mVpp . Hence we require to amplify the sound wave up to 20 times. Opamp is operated in non-inverting mode. As output from microphone varies from person to person gain of amplier is made variable using Rf as variable resistor of 500 k . G=1+ Rf R1 (1)

Fig. 4.

Filter circuit.

C. Analog to Digital Conversion The output of the lter is given to the input of the Analog to Digital Converter. We have used the ADC4 of the Atmega32 microcontroller. ATmega32 has 8 ADC i/p channels and each channels give 10-bit resolution. We can use adc in 8-bit also by setting ADLAR bit in ADMUX register. We are using ADC in 8-bit and auto trigger mode, so ADC will start next conversion on the next clock cycle of last conversion. The ADC value is compared with the threshold value set by user and if it is greater than the threshold value then start Timer1. Timer1 is used to measure the time perion between two peaks, which is used to determine the heart rate. When we get second time peak stop Timer1 and take the value of TCNT1 and calculate the heart rate form this. D. Graphic LCD interface Graphic LCD which we have used is JHD12864. It is 128*64 bits LCD. It has 20 pin Interface. The interfacing diagram [4] [5] is as shown in Fig 5. Graphic LCD can be programmed bit by bit so you can turn on or off the particular pixel. It has two controllers on it. One controller controls the left 64 columns(0-63) and another controller controls the right side 64 columns(64-127). The CS1 and CS2 signal helps to select either of the controller. We have used one software BMP2LCD to convert given Bmp le into .asm le giving values of each location. We had created welcome screen using this software. III. SIMULATION RESULTS In order to check whether our designed circuit is working as required we have simulated design of amplier as well as lter using Livewire. For simulation of amplier stage we have given the input of 800 mVpp and observed the output wave. Result of simulation is as shown in graph Fig.6. In simulation feedback resistor is kept at 100k, hence actual gain is 5.5. Here we are getting

From above equation(1) R1 is obtained to be 22k. Hence complete amplier stage is shown as in Fig.3.

Fig. 3.

Pre-amplier circuit.

B. Filter Designing Heart beat contains sound with frequencies varying from 10Hz to 200Hz. Medical professionals try to hear specic sound called murmur for study. This sound generally has frequencies below 100Hz. Hence for diagnostic purpose frequencies below 100Hz are signicant. So as to reduce the unwanted frequencies as well as noise low pass KRC lter [3] is designed having cut-off frequency of 100Hz. Cut-off frequency equation of lter is given by: fo = 1 2 R2 C2 R3 C3 (2)

Considering R2 =R3 =R and C2 = C3 = C and taking C = 0.1 F , R=18k. The lter circuit is as shown in Fig.4

Fig. 5.

Graphic LCD interface.

Fig. 7.

Schematic diagram.

output of 4 Vpp . Hence according to simulation gain obtained as 5 which is in accordance with the theoretical value.

V. DIGITAL CIRCUIT

Fig. 6.

Simulation Result of Amplier.

For verication of lter design we applied different frequency input to our circuit and observed the output wave form. We observed that output was attenuated for frequency above 100Hz which was in accordance with our design.

Fig. 8.

Digital Circuit.

IV. ANALOG CIRCUIT IMPLEMENTATION

We have develoed our schematic in Cadsoft Eagle Software. The schematic digram of our project is as shown in Fig 7.

The heart of the Digital circuit is an ATmega32 microcontroller. It is a powerful RISC 8-bit microcontroller, with 32kB internal FLASH program memory, 512 bytes EEPROM and 512 bytes of SRAM refer Fig.8. Its RISC CPU core can execute almost 1 instruction per cycle. The core is complemented with a rich set of peripherals, including I/O ports, timers, PWM, A/D converters,etc. The signal is picked up by a condenser microphone and amplied by an op-amp based amplier.It is ltered and passed to the MCUs A/D converter, which samples the audio at a rate of 1MHz. The ATmega32

features a 10-bit successive approximation ADC. The ADC is connected to an 8-channel Analog Multiplexer which allows eight single-ended voltage inputs constructed from the pins of Port A. The single-ended voltage inputs refer to 0V (GND). The ADC converts an analog input voltage to a 10-bit digital value through successive approximation. The minimum value represents GND and the maximum value represents the voltage on the AREF pin minus 1 LSB. The 10-bit samples are scaled down to 8 bits before storage. VI. SOFTWARE DESCRIPTION We are using ATmega 32 for our porject. The programming is done in embedded C language using Code Vision AVR. The Software consist of intialization of Graphic LCD, ADC, TIMER1 and Interrupt. ADC initialization consist of initializing adc in 8-bit mode and auto trigerrable. TIMER1 initialization means intializing timer1(16-bit) in normal mode of operation with top value as 0xFFFF and intial value as 0000. Intializing Interrupt means setting the Global Interrupt enable bit as 1. Graphic LCD initialization consists of sending command to GLCD. This Command is given in the datasheet of GLCD. VII. C ONCLUSION In this project we have implemented Digital Stethoscope with the help of Atmega32 microcontroller and some additional amplier and lter circuitry. We displayed the heart beat on GLCD and calculated beat rate per minutes. As this Digital Stethoscope is hand held it becomes very convenient to use. This can be used to study the cardiac sound and compare it with standard sound. Our project is open for further improvements such as storing of heart beats for detailed study and outputting it to speaker for clear listening. These improvements can be done just by adding some circuitry while the main circuitry remains the same. R EFERENCES
[1] http://courses.cit.cornell.edu [2] Datasheets:Atmel AVR ATMEGA32,LM358,JHD12864. [3] Design with Operational amplier and analog Integrated Circuits by Sergio Franko. [4] http://extremeelectronics.co.in/avr-tutorials/ interfacing-graphical-lcd-with-avr-mcu-part-ii.htm [5] http://www.serasidis.gr/circuits/AVR-oscilloscope/ avr-oscilloscope.htm