Can Multi-Source Phonocardiography Enable Inexperienced Users to Record Heart Sounds for Telemonitoring Applications? A Comparative Analysis

The use of heart sounds in telemonitoring is extremely appealing due to portability, low cost, non-invasiveness. Nevertheless, the positioning of the electronic stethoscope is critical and prevents the use of phonocardiography (PCG) by inexperienced users. Multi-source PCG may provide a solution: by recording multiple signals from different points on the chest at high spatial resolution the problem of finding the best auscultation point is moved from the recording phase to the processing phase. In this study, we compare the quality of PCG signals recorded by inexperienced users through multi-source PCG against the quality of PCG signals recorded by an expert through a traditional single-source system. We enrolled 42 inexperienced volunteers and asked them to record signals on each other using a multi-sensor array that we designed for this purpose. An expert user also recorded signals from each volunteer from the four typical auscultation areas. Experimental results show that the multi-source system enabled inexperienced users to record signals of equal or better quality. We believe that our results lay the foundations to apply multi-source PCG in homecare.