Listening has always been instrumental to diagnoses, but have listening instruments changed over time? This podcast touches on this interesting history and spotlights a healthcare innovation making the most of wireless stethoscopes when safe distances are even more important.

Listen and learn

• Why Clive Smith of Thinklabs thought a digital stethoscope project would benefit the medical community,
• How artificial intelligence matched with this stethoscope can combine to offer medical professionals a plethora of helpful information, and
• How One Digital Stethoscope is especially useful with the pandemic.

Clive Smith started Thinklabs in the early '90s after graduate work at Cal Tech in electrical engineering. He focused on electronic and signal processing and was eager to start a company specializing in the innovation and application of electronics and technology.

The name says it all—he went with Thinklabs to signal a company that would handle and solve interesting problems with hands-on lab work. When he encountered the lag of stethoscope advancement in the mid '90s, he knew he'd found an important project.  But he soon found that it was a "very nontrivial problem" to extract sound from the human body, and it took eight years to come up with this innovation in digital healthcare technologies. 

While the product has been on the market for about 17 years now and sees wide use in normal clinical medicine and telemedicine, the COVID crisis has made its remote abilities especially useful. Furthermore, now that AI technology has caught up a bit, numerous studies can take place to recognize its true potential. At the most basic level, doctors are able to hear things much more clearly and enable earlier diagnoses of conditions. But it's expected that data collecting and analyzing will reveal patterns and correlations with even more implications.

To find out more, see the website for Thinklabs.

Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK