Following the interest from cardiologists in my iphone application iStethoscope, a few months ago I began a collaboration with cardiologist researcher Glenn Nordehn based at the Medical School of the University of Minnesota Duluth. This led to the professional version, iStethoscope Pro which according to Glenn works better than many commercially available digital stethoscopes. We recently began a medical trial with the app, allowing users to email their heart audio to Glenn’s lab where they intend to analyse the data and create a machine learning system capable of automatic diagnosis from heart audio. In the meantime, we have nearly finished another collaboration: I’ve created an iphone version of Glenn’s proven auscultation training course. It teaches the user how to listen and understand the spectrogram (as produced in iStethoscope Pro and recognise specific abnormalities associated with heart problems) We’re calling the app iAuscultate and it should be available from iTunes in the next few weeks. It’s amazing how excited the medical profession is getting about the potential of iphone apps like these!

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