Giving the Humble Stethoscope an AI Upgrade Could Save Millions of Kids (ieee.org)

the_newsbeagle writes: The stethoscope is a ubiquitous medical tool that has barely changed since it was invented in the early 1800s. But now a team of engineers, doctors, and public health researchers have come together to reinvent the tool using adaptive acoustics and AI. Their motivation is this statistic: Every year, nearly 1 million kids die of pneumonia around the world, with most deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The death toll is highest among children under the age of 5. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins University, designed a smart stethoscope for use by unskilled workers in noisy medical clinics. It uses a dynamic audio filtering system to remove ambient noise and distracting body sounds while not interfering with the subtle sounds from the lungs. And it uses AI to analyze the cleaned-up signal and provide a diagnosis.

Comments

Re:Why would it need to change?

[rtb61]

If you are sending a child to an unskilled worker in a noisy medical clinic, chance that a better far more expensive stethoscope will fix the problem, well, fucking less than zero. See problem right fucking there, 'UNSKILLED WORKER', a bloody witch doctor would be better than sending them to an unskilled worker, who can diagnose one thing and one thing only with a better stethoscope, any other condition and you are fucked.