Introduction: Auscultation is the medical term for listening to internal body sounds. Heart sounds, lung sounds, bowel sounds and blood flowing sounds through veins are some examples for internal body sounds. A stethoscope is the device which used by the medical practitioners to listen those sounds. Acoustic stethoscope is the standard stethoscope type which is used by the medical practitioners. But due to low signal level and the inability to amplify the sound there is growing interest in research related to the electronic stethoscopes.

Methods and Results: In this study, a wireless electronic stethoscope is developed to listen heart sounds. Electret mic inside the chest piece captures the heart sound of the patient. Then it converts the captured acoustic energy to electrical energy. But the output of the electret mic is weak, therefore, before filtering noise, the signal should be amplified. The amplification before processing is called as pre-amplification. After the pre-amplification, the output is fed to a 2^nd order low pass Butterworth filter. Then, the filter output is given to the input of the power amplifier. The power amplifier is used to increase the power of the signal before transmitting via Bluetooth. Then, the signal is transmitted via Bluetooth using XS 3868 Bluetooth module. The received signal is analyzed by the personal computer. A user interface to visualize the received heart sound is also implemented.

Conclusion/implications: This research is helpful for medical practitioners. This can be further developed to identify specific abnormalities of the heart.