Smartphones turned into electronic stethoscopes to record heartbeats

An app is allowing thousands of people to upload their heart sounds, which could one day allow home diagnosis of heart conditions

By Clare Wilson

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We may soon be able to diagnose cardiac problems at home using ordinary smartphones to record the sounds of our heart beating.

An app that lets people record their heart sounds has been found to make recordings of high-enough quality that you can hear your own heart beating, reported Pablo Lamata from King’s College London at New Scientist Live today.

When doctors listen to the heart using an ordinary stethoscope, they may be able to diagnose conditions such as heart failure, the irregular beat of atrial fibrillation or heart murmurs – when blood doesn’t flow properly through the heart’s valves.

The next step is to see if this “electronic stethoscope” could used to make medical diagnoses, said Lamata, who is part of a group developing the approach.

Some smartwatches can measure heart rate and the heart’s electrical activity. And people can already use phone apps to record their heart sounds.

Lamata’s app, called Echoes, is providing the first large-scale database of such sound recordings, connected with some basic personal information on the users.

Echoes tells people to sit in a quiet room leaning slightly forward – and to place their phone’s microphone at four different sites on their chest to make a short recording.

The sound is turned into a visual display, known as a waveform, so users can see as well as hear their heart sounds. At the moment, it is only available for iPhones, because these have better microphones.

Users also input their age, gender, height and weight and need to give permission for their heart sounds to be uploaded to the database. It now contains more than 100,000 recordings and will be a valuable resource for heart researchers, said Lamata.

“We have learned the quality of the microphone for voice is enough for heart recordings,” he said at New Scientist Live. Results from the first 5000 users were also published in a recent paper.

The group’s original intention was simply to get people more interested in learning about their heart health. “Then we thought: ‘What if we start asking [medical] questions?’” said Lamata.

At the moment, the app doesn’t give out any diagnostic information, but people may try to assess their heart sounds using medical websites. “We don’t suggest that people do this,” says Lamata.

If the app is modified to allow home diagnosis, one potential downside is that it may encourage people with health anxiety to check their heart sounds too frequently, says Leanne Grech of UK charity the British Heart Foundation, which helped fund the project.

Journal reference: European Heart Journal – Digital Health, DOI: 10.1093/ehjdh/ztac044