CORELSA - Remote stethoscope system for fast and standardized auscultations of large numbers of patients with respiratory syndromes

Abstract

One of the major impacts of the current COVID-19 pandemic is the immense strain that is being put on the intensive care units. As a typical SARS-CoV-2 infection often leads to severe acute respiratory syndromes, one of the most basic essential examinations is lung auscultation. There are different categories of lung sounds that can be assessed with a stethoscope like crackles, wheezes, rhonchi and coarse breath sounds. Each of these malicious lung sounds contribute to a clinical assessment and follow-up of the patient's airways and lungs and can indicate the development of pneumonia. Therefore, auscultation on a regular basis is essential, but it also takes a lot of time for the physicians. Moreover, because of the risk of infection for health care workers, it is becoming increasingly difficult or sometimes impossible to safely use a stethoscope. Here we introduce a remote stethoscope system that can help to reduce the workload of physicians and nurses, diminishes the risk of contamination and leads to more standardized auscultation, which can also be stored and reevaluated. We provide a detailed description of our system, which consists of parts that are low cost, easily available in most parts of the world, or can be 3D printed. We provide instructions and an open source software stack to run such a system for a large number of patients which can be remotely auscultated from a central computer. We believe that the system described in this paper can allow various institutes to replicate the system, and increase the safety and reduce the overall workload in the intensive care units around the world.