MELBOURNE – Four students from the University of Melbourne have developed
StethoCloud, a custom built stethoscope and mobile phone app system that
analyzes a person’s breathing to determine if they have pneumonia.
The StethoCloud is the creation
of Hon Weng Chong, Kim Ramchen, Mahsa Salehi, and Andrew Lin for Microsoft’s
student innovation competition, the Imagine Cup. The project won
Microsoft Australia’s national Imagine Cup and placed in the worldwide finals.
Two of the team members, Chong
and Lin, have a medical school background and have interned in developing
nations. After a conversation about pneumonia with his mentor at the
university, global health expert Dr. Jim Black, Chong spent two weeks in
February developing a prototype. “The first one I was like, ‘why aren’t we
getting any sounds?’” says Chong, “and the next one, we were getting all this
extra noise so we kept refining it.”
Solving the problems of those
early versions resulted in a stethoscope that comes embedded with a tiny mic
and has been modified to block out external noise and heat. To use the
system, a community health worker—or even an unskilled user—simply plugs
the stethoscope into the jack on a mobile phone, places it on the appropriate
sections of the body, and boots up the phone’s StethoCloud app, which was
designed by the computer science and big data experts on the team: Ramchen and
Salehi.
The mic captures the sounds of
the person breathing and the app uploads the recording onto cloud servers. Then
the app analyzes the breathing patterns, makes a diagnosis according to the
standards of the World Health Organization—either the subject has pneumonia or
doesn’t—and then presents the user with the appropriate treatment plan.
While a regular digital
stethoscope runs over US$600, the StethoCloud only costs about US$20, which is
significantly more affordable in the developing nations that are home to 98% of
childhood pneumonia deaths. And, although a phone is required for the system to
work, about “1.5 million pneumonia deaths occur in developing countries with a
high enough mobile usage that we can directly address it without distributing
anything else,” says Lin.
The team has research protocols
going on with the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and they’ve sent the
prototype to hospitals and health organizations in Ghana, Malaysia, and
Mozambique. Lin, who previously interned at the WHO, says that getting the
StethoCloud put into use “is a complicated process” since “public health
organizations don’t always work on the same timeline.” The team hopes to see
some level of adoption within the next year in the countries that need it most,
since early and accurate diagnosis for even 10 percent of the cases means
210,000 deaths prevented.
Above all, the students are
thrilled to be able use their computer science and medical knowledge for good.
“We’re deeply passionate about pneumonia, about saving children,” says Lin.
“Honestly, this is the dream of every student. This is what you want to do when
you’re little. You want to be that one that makes a difference, and that’s what
we’re setting out to do.”
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