Thinklabs - The Stethoscope

Visualize heart and lung sounds with Thinklabs Phonocardiography. Expand the capability and power of your Thinklabs digital stethoscope by capturing sounds on your iPod, PC or Mac Notebook. Now you can display, edit, amplify, filter, slow down playback rate, show spectrograms and more.

Thinklabs Phonocardiography Software provides easy visualization and editing of heart sounds and lung sounds recorded from your Thinklabs Digital Stethoscope. The software can be downloaded free and works with both PC or Apple Mac computers. With Thinklabs Phonocardiography, you can use your Thinklabs Stethoscope to take Auscultation to a whole new level, whether you are in Medical Education or Clinical Practice. Here are just some of the features and benefits:

Thinklabs Stethoscope System Solutions

Easy to Use

- Record and Playback sounds as if you are using a simple tape recorder.

- Display and visualize sounds very clearly and intuitively.

- Manipulate sounds with ease, using your mouse.

- Save results easily in sound files or group sets of sounds in Project files.

phonocardiography_screenshot Capture Sounds

- Record from your Thinklabs Stethoscope directly to a Notebook Computer.

- Import recordings from your iPod or mp3 player.

- Import recordings from email attachments or downloaded from the Internet.

Playback and Export Sounds

- Play back sounds on a PC via headphones, or via your Thinklabs Stethoscope.

- Edit and Export sounds to new files for lectures, emails, podcasts, websites, or burn CDs.

Visualize Sounds

- Display heart sound Waveforms.

- Display lung sound Waveforms.

- Display Spectrograms (frequency spectrum) of heart sounds and lung sounds.

- Display Waveform and Spectrograms together to correlate timing and frequency.

- Display FFT’s of a segment of sound to observe frequency content.

Manipulate Sounds

- Amplify Sounds after they have been captured.

- Filter recorded sounds to refine recordings or look for specific sound characteristics. Both standard pre-set filters and user-defined filters can be used.

- Rate Change – Slow down recordings so that details such as splits are more audible.

Edit, Annotate and produce Electronic Medical Records phonocardiography_screenshot_light

- Cut, Copy or Paste sound segments.

- Label Sound tracks to identify specific events such as S3, S4, murmurs, etc.

- Import groups of sounds for one patient, or a group of patients into Projects that can be saved, so that you can later open a single Project file to access all related Sounds.

- Save images of Waveforms and Spectrograms along with Labels for medical records or research papers.

Auscultation Research for Advanced Users

- Investigate heart sounds and lung sounds for new diagnostic methods.

- Develop software analysis methods. Thinklabs Phonocardiography is built on the award winning Audacity Open Source platform. The software source code is freely available for any researchers or software developers who wish to expand the power of auscultation with new analysis software.

Get Your Copy of Thinklabs Phonocardiography Software Below

for Windows

for Mac

Medical Education

Thinklabs is working to improve auscultation education with products and services to the medical education community. Our systems approach sees the clinician and the stethoscope as one. We have developed the leading stethoscope. It is now our duty to help you teach the skills that bring out the best in both your students and our devices.

Over the years, we have had many requests from academics to help you share sounds with students, at the bedside, in the classroom, online. We're now building that system.

Multi-Link - The Multi-Link is a cost-effective system for sharing sounds with a group of students around a bedside. Multi-Link provides a system that allows students to connect their Thinklabs Stethoscope System Solutions

Thinklabs stethoscopes or headphones to a primary Thinklabs stethoscope being used to examine the patient. Students can listen to the primary stethoscope in real time. It is also possible to play iPod or PC sounds through the Multi-Link. Available Summer 2008.

Apple iPod Hi-Fi - While headphones are far superior to loudspeakers for reproducing heart sounds, the Apple iPod Hi-Fi provides remarkably good reproduction of heart sounds and lung sounds. It is possible to connect your Thinklabs Stethoscope or iPod to the Apple Hi-Fi to play a patient's heart or lung sounds to a group, or to play back iPod recordings.

What You Need

Multi-Link will be available from Thinklabs and is compatible with your Thinklabs stethoscope so you won't need to purchase a new Thinklabs stethoscope. Contact Thinklabs for more details at 1-800-918-1088 or send up an email via website Support.

The Apple Hi-Fi is available from any Apple Store or other Apple Dealer. See http://www.apple.com/ipodhifi/ for more details. (Apple, iPod, are trademarks of Apple Inc.)

Auscultation Teaching

Every Thinklabs stethoscope includes a built-in connection and cables for a second set of headphones. You can also connect two Thinklabs stethoscopes together using the supplied cables.

Now you can quickly and easily mentor a student, or request a second opinion while listening to a patient.

As an example of how physicians are creatively extended the use of Thinklabs stethoscopes, physicians are using the second headphone connection to educate their patients. Parents of asthmatic kids can now listen along with the doctor and learn about the sounds of their child's breathing. Doctors are having their patients listen as a way to motivate patients to stop smoking!
Thinklabs Stethoscope System Solutions

Nursing schools are using the second listener feature to teach students how to take accurate blood pressures. Despite hypertension being among the most treated diseases today, blood pressure readings are less accurate than necessary. This causes serious problems for doctors charged with adjusting dosages and monitoring patients. Nursing schools are therefore pro-actively using Thinklabs technology to address this problem.

What you Need

Your Thinklabs stethoscopes comes with the cables you need to connect external headphones or a two Thinklabs stethoscopes. All you need are the external headphones, or two stethoscopes.

The quality of the external headphones is an important factor. Fortunately, many small low-cost headphones used for iPods now come with stethoscope-style sealed eartips. This is critical for listening to the low frequency sounds of a heart murmur. We therefore recommend that you use earbuds that have sealed eartips. If you use larger headphones, test them first to make sure that their bass response is up to the task.

If you use a second Thinklabs Stethoscope, you will guarantee that both listeners hear the absolute clarity for which Thinklabs stethoscopes are know and admired. The loudspeaker drivers in a Thinklabs stethoscope are designed specifically to reproduce the low frequencies in a heart murmur.

For more information, contact us at 800-918-1088 or go to the Support page and send us an email.

Recording Heart Sounds and Lung Sounds

Thinklabs stethoscopes enable you to record heart sounds or lung sounds on your iPod or other mp3 recorder. Now you can capture any interesting sounds on the fly. You can also listen to your iPod recordings through your stethoscope or headphones. The sound is so accurately recorded you'll think you're listening to the patient.

As a part of Thinklabs System Solutions, you can also upload sounds to your PC or Mac and display, edit and annotate recordings. This is just one example of how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts - the idea driving Thinklabs System Solutions thinking.
Thinklabs Stethoscope Systems Solutions

Applications

Clinical Practice - Capture auscultation sounds on your iPod and incorporate them into your Electronic Medical Records (EMR). This is useful for tracking a patient's progress so that heart or lung sounds can be compared with previous visits. Physicians have used this to determine whether drug dosages need to be adjusted, whether patients have improved or regressed, etc. You can also email recordings to colleagues for second opinions.

Academic Teaching - Collect interesting sounds or build sound libraries for teaching. The quality of iPod recordings is vastly superior to the typical audio materials used to teach auscultation. Now you can create sound sets specific to your own teaching curriculum. Sounds can be distributed to students via email, posted on websites or university intranets, or burned onto CDs. Studies have shown that students who listen repetitively to auscultation sounds improve their recognition rates from 30% to almost 90%.

Student Evaluations - Record specific sounds and incorporate them into the patient record when developing standardized patient cases or examination materials. One medical school has reported equipping students with Thinklabs stethoscopes and iPods and required students to record the sounds they hear on rounds. Examiners then listen to the recordings to compare them with findings claimed by the students.

stethoscope_with_ipod

Learning - Fellows, Residents and Medical Students can record sounds for presentation, journal clubs, and second opinions. Now a student, upon hearing something suspicious or interesting, can later consult with mentors to verify findings. This significantly enhances learning opportunities.

Presentations, Documentation, Journal Articles - Thinklabs Phonocardiography software allows you to upload iPod recordings, display, edit and annotate them. The combination of Stethoscope, iPod and Software is an example of Thinklabs System Solution in action - the synergy that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

What You Need

Your Thinklabs Stethoscope includes cables required to connect your stethoscope to iPods and other recording devices. You also need the following:

- Apple iPod 2G nano or Video, or other recording device.
- Xtrememac Micromemo Recording Dock.

Thinklabs also offers a complete Stethoscope Recording Package which includes a Thinklabs ds32a Digital Stethoscope, Apple iPod 2GBytes, Micromemo Recorder, and a comprehensive User's Manual. You can order any of these components or packages from Thinklabs at our online store, or by calling 800-918-1088.

Thinklabs Stethoscope System Solutions

Thinklabs offers solutions to problems that have long challenged the teaching and clinical use of auscultation. Quite simply, we are bringing the stethoscope into the 21st Century.

Thinklabs Stethoscope System Solutions transforms the power of the stethoscope, using powerful software and devices you already own - iPod, Notebook computer - to provide a gateway to completely new auscultation capability.

Thinklabs System Solutions

Thinklabs Systems Thinking - the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. Wherever you see this symbol, it means you can innovate in your practice, your hospital, your medical school.

Systems Solutions in Action

Software and Internet Connectivity - Record sounds on your PC or Mac Notebook computer, Upload sounds from your iPod, and then display Waveforms, Spectrograms, edit and manage sounds files. Upload and download sounds files, email patient sounds, build patient sound libraries and more.

iPod Recording and Playback - Record sounds with CD quality, Play them with perfect fidelity, Upload them to your PC or Mac.

2nd Listener External Headphones - Plug external headphones into your stethoscope for a second listener. Valuable for teaching, mentoring, and second opinions. The second headphones can be regular headphones, or a second Thinklabs Stethoscope.

Multi-Link - Connect your Thinklabs Stethoscope or iPod to the Multi-Link to facilitate group listening for teaching sessions. (Coming Fall 2007).

Thinklabs Systems Philosophy

Auscultation has always been difficult to teach, challenging to learn, and clinically limited by the fact that sounds had to be described in words rather than recorded.

Imagine a world in which X rays were viewed on a screen while the patient is present, but never recorded on film or disk? The clinician would be limited to describing findings in a written document - no second opinion, no close examination by a specialist, no visual record for follow-up comparison. So it is with stethoscope sound. There for the patient exam, and gone when the patient leaves.

At Thinklabs, we believe that the stethoscope is an "extension of the clinician". The stethoscope is only as good as the skill level of the professional using it. We thus see the problem as a "system" problem and it is incumbent on us to develop not only a superb stethoscope, but the tools to ensure that the stethoscope is used to its full potential. We call this the Systems Solution.

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ds32a Digital Electronic Stethoscope

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