Practical microcontroller-based simulator of graphical heart sounds with disorders

Abstract

Finding volunteer patients and/or getting ethical approval for experimental studies on human participants are generally serious problems in the field of biomedical engineering. Therefore, this paper presents a new microcontroller-based phonocardiogram (PCG) signals simulator. The developed simulator generates graphical representations of normal and three diseased heart sounds; namely mitral valve insufficiency, aortic stenosis, and ventricular septal defect. Discrete wavelet transform has been used to pre-process four heart sounds datasets, in order to denoise and decompose these PCG signals to the third approximated level. The developed PCG simulator was implemented using the Arduino Due® microcontroller. The simulated PCG signals are nearly equal to the real heart signals. Therefore, they are accepted to represent different scenarios of the heart sounds with disorders clinically. Graphical microcontroller-based heart sounds simulator has been successfully developed to support biomedical engineering education and research studies in the field of physiological signals analysis.