An early detection of heart disease can save lives, caution individuals and also help to determine the type of treatment to be given to the patients. The first test of diagnosing a heart disease is through auscultation - listening to the heart sounds. The interpretation of heart sounds is subjective and requires a professional skill to identify the abnormalities in these sounds. A medical practitioner uses a stethoscope to perform an initial screening by listening for irregular sounds from the patient's chest. Later, echocardiography and electrocardiography tests are taken for further diagnosis. However, these tests are expensive and require specialized technicians to operate. A simple and economical way is vital for monitoring in homecare or rural hospitals and urban clinics. This dissertation is focused on developing a patient-centered device for initial screening of the heart sounds that is both low cost and can be used by the users on themselves, and later share the readings with the healthcare providers. An innovative mobile health service platform is created for analyzing and classifying heart sounds. Certain properties of heart sounds have to be evaluated to identify the irregularities such as the number of heart beats and gallops, intensity, frequency, and duration. Since heart sounds are generated in low frequencies, human ears tend to miss certain sounds as the high frequency sounds mask the lower ones. Therefore, this dissertation provides a solution to process the heart sounds using several signal processing techniques, identifies the features in the heart sounds and finally classifies them. This dissertation enables remote patient monitoring through the integration of advanced wireless communications and a customized low-cost stethoscope. It also permits remote management of patients' cardiac status while maximizing patient mobility. The smartphone application facilities recording, processing, visualizing, listening, and classifying heart sounds. The application also generates an electronic medical record, which is encrypted using the efficient elliptic curve cryptography and sent to the cloud, facilitating access to physicians for further analysis. Thus, this dissertation results in a patient-centered device that is essential for initial screening of the heart sounds, and could be shared for further diagnosis with the medical care practitioners.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1159216 |
| Date | 12 1900 |
| Creators | Thiyagaraja, Shanti |
| Contributors | Dantu, Ram, Caragea, Cornelia, Bryant, Barrett R., Sarma, Satyam |
| Publisher | University of North Texas |
| Source Sets | University of North Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | Text |
| Rights | Public, Thiyagaraja, Shanti, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved. |
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