Monitoring COVID-19 Patients Using Cardio-Pulmonary Stethoscope RF Technology

Abstract

The COVID-19 disease recognized as pandemic in 2020 created worldwide shortage of medical resources causing hospitals to admit only the severe cases and leaving the rest to selfcare. The identified covid19 patient with non-life-threatening stage had to monitor the disease progression based on the escalation of symptoms or do imaging tests like CT scans, x-ray. The imaging method while reliable comes with its own limitation and risks of exposure. In this paper, we checked the efficacy of utilizing Cardio-Pulmonary Stethoscope (CPS) to monitor the COVID-19 patient and assess the disease progressive status. The simulations were ran on anatomically realistic human model with infection at various location, size and spread reflecting real COVID-19 infected lungs. The least detectable size of injury was found to be the ellipsoid of ~0.9 cubic cm, and the most consistent result was observed in the healthy lung with water content of 20%. The results presented in this paper suggest that CPS could be used as the alternative to CT scans for continuous monitoring.