Today the Guardian newspaper in UK published an article on my iphone app iStethoscope Pro. It continues the extraordinary interest shown in this app, which never ceases to surprise me. Something else which surprised me was the photo... why they chose the one with me screwing up my eyes in the sunshine I don't know!

The article can be found online here, and I include a copy of it below.

Some exciting news about my iphone app iStethoscope Pro today. There has been more media interest (watch this space for details), and more interest from cardiologists, this time in Greece. The app was also featured on Apple's AppStore as a "hot app." But, perhaps the most exciting news is that research by cardiologists who made use of the app to gather heart audio has just been published in the Journal of Medical Devices. The article even has the app name in its title! For those who prefer a full citation, here it is, with a link to the abstract:

Dustin Palm, Stan Burns, Trichy Pasupathy, Eric Deip, Brittney Blair, Misty Flynn, Amanda Drewek, Matt Sjostrand, Brian Stephenson, Glenn Nordehn. (2010) "Artificial Neural Network Analysis of Heart Sounds Captured From an Acoustic Stethoscope and Emailed Using iStethoscopePro" J. Med. Devices 4, 027531 (2010); doi:10.1115/1.3443737

This is the official support page for iStethoscope Free, the new free version of the highly popular iStethoscope Pro program. It has all the same audio capabilities and settings as the Pro version; the difference is that it has adverts and it does not have the spectrogram display.

iStethoscope is hugely configurable, allowing you to change every major setting in the program. Please provide your favourite settings as comments below, to help other users. There is already extensive support available on the iStethoscope Pro page so if you have a problem the solution may be there already. If you still have difficulties, then please read the help pages and comments first. If you can't find a solution, then leave a query below and I'll reply on this page within a day or 3. If you enjoy this application, please check out the popular science book: The Undercover Scientist

Help page for iStethoscope: http://www.peterjbentley.com/istethoscope.html

iStethoscope Free was released on App Store on July 30 2010. It is the firmware 4.0 compatible version of the popular original iStethoscope program. If you have an iPhone 4 please visit this page for tips on settings.

The videos below provide hints and tips on using the application:

 

Learning to use iStethoscope:

 

Placing the microphone:

 

Activation:

 

Why can't I hear my heart?

 

Emailing audio:

 

Changing filter settings:

 

Changing audio mode settings:

I've now got an iPhone 4 and tested my app iStethoscope Pro with the new device. The good news is that it works fine and the microphone may be more sensitive, so it may be even easier to hear your heartbeat with the new device. The bad news is that the frequency response of the iPhone 4 microphone appears to be slightly different to that of the iPhone 3G, so there is less detail at the very low frequencies and more noise at higher frequencies. Do please note that the location of the microphone is different in the iPhone 4 - it is on the bottom left, not on the bottom right!

Because the iPhone 4 has a different microphone and casing, it is necessary to modify the audio filter settings in order to hear the clearest heart sounds. My suggestion is:

Use Heartbeat pure mode and in the Audio Settings change to

Alpha value (default 150) = 125

Amplification (default 0.25) = 1

In General, scroll down and change Spectrogram scaling to

Heartbeat pure (default 0.5) = 0.3

As usual you can find the detailed help pages here and here. If you have your own suggestions for settings for the iPhone 4, leave a comment here. Otherwise if you have any problems, please leave your comments on the main support page as usual.

The publicity for my iStethoscope iphone app continues. This month I was contacted by yet more medical researchers asking about the possibility of collaboration, and Swiss magazine NZZ Folio published an article describing the app. This is what they said: