Abstract: Heart sound and heart rate (pulse) are the most common physiological signals to diagnose cardiovascular diseases. Measuring these signals using one device and analyzing their interrelationships simultaneously can improve the accuracy of existing methods and propose new approaches for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. Therefore, a personal multi-modal smart stethoscope with dual deterministic model-based heart sound analysis (DDM-HSA) has been developed for daily cardiovascular health monitoring. The proposed device is designed as a compact PC mouse for easy grasping and attachment to the surface of the chest using only one hand. A digital microphone and photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor are installed on the bottom and top surfaces of the device, respectively, to simultaneously measure heart sound and pulse from the user’s chest and finger. Also, the DDM-HSA is designed in a parallel structure that uses these two physiological signals related to the heartbeat, enabling more accurate heart sound identification. The experimental results show that the promising performance of the proposed device with the DDM-HSA had the highest performance in automatic S1 and S2 heart sound identification. The findings of this study are anticipated to provide improved technology to detect heart sounds and analyze cardiac activities using only physiological signals that wearable devices can measure in a mobile environment for daily life.

Keywords: Multimodal, physiological signal, cardiovascular disease, wearable device, self-diagnosis.

Biography: Qun Wei received the B. S. degree in electrical engineering from Kyungpook National University, Daegu, South Korea, in 2008. He received the M. S. and Ph. D degrees in video processing and biomedical engineering, IT College, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, South Korea. He specializes in various hearing aids development, such as fully implementable hearing aids and binaural hearing aids. He is an Assistant Professor of biomedical engineering at the College of Engineering, Keimyung University, Daegu, South Korea. His research interests include analog circuit design for physiological signal measurement and IoT-based smart healthcare system design. Since 2023, he founded a start-up company, Clairaudience Co., Ltd, to develop novel wearable healthcare devices to monitor health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, congenital heart disease, and lung disease by developing various life’s sound signal measurement and processing technologies.