DigiScope

Heart related diseases are the leading cause of deaths across the world. As per WHO, ischaemic heart diseases (caused by narrowing of arteries) account for over 16% of the world’s total deaths. Early diagnosis of these issues plays a vital role in preventing these deaths and making way for suitable interventions. Most cardiovascular diseases are associated with and can be identified by the sound signature of the heart. 

Listening to the heart sounds with the aid of a stethoscope has been an important traditional method for early diagnosis of cardiac dysfunction. We propose the idea of an advanced digital stethoscope - DigiScope - intended to address early diagnosis of cardiovascular ailments and diseases for rural communities; ones lacking access to doctors and trained medical professionals. DigiScope is a social enterprise committed to the production, manufacturing and distribution of these digital stethoscopes to  rural communities to improve remote access to quality health care for individuals vulnerable to and suffering from cardiac dysfunction.

Diving into the details, the instrument will be used to record heart signature for remote auscultation by doctors. Doing so will facilitate early identification of cardiovascular ailments for patients who cannot afford to travel long distances for consultation. There are two parts to the proposed device design: 

1. Assisting a layman with the stethoscope

One of the major challenges is that a lay person does not know where to place the stethoscope for the required signature. Here, the individual can be assisted with stethoscope placement by using computer vision on a mobile application. The mobile phone camera will assess the skeletal structure of the patient, perform a prediction to identify the heart's position and finally assist the user in placement. To begin with, we will be relying on healthcare workers for on-ground implementation. 

2. Signal Processing

Depending on the observed signal quality, we will be filtering out the right frequencies, clean up the signal and amplify it for easy evaluation of the sounds. Selecting the right frequencies of interest is key here for we do not want to ignore any frequencies corresponding to heart issues when we are filtering out the noise.

Our primary target population comprises rural settings in Ghana. Most rural communities in emerging economies like Ghana do not have easy access to clinics and doctors. The local people have to travel long distances to nearby towns or cities for medical consultation. Often times, due to lack of resources, diseases or health ailments are either diagnosed late or not diagnosed at all. 

In communities where there are clinics, these are usually staffed by nurses, who often have to procure their own stethoscopes. The quality of these stethoscopes are unfortunately not standardized. Also, the medical training of healthcare workers/nurses is lacking.

The team members - Jean, Shubham and Raghav - are working towards similar interests to pursue a masters in development engineering at UC Berkeley.  Development Engineering is a field of research and practice that involves different engineering principles brought together with economics, entrepreneurship, design to solve the problems associated in rural communities via technological innovations. Currently, we are all focused towards different concentrations; 

Jean Roberts - Healthcare

Raghav Mittal - AI/ML for Social Impact

Shubham Salunkhe - Energy, Water and the Environment

All three of us are strongly driven engineers from emerging countries in the global south. Our engineering training and experiences, hailing from these regions, provide us the holistic point of view while designing the product. We have spent time understanding the ground operations in these settings.

We have engineering expertise and understanding of digital signal processing and Jean's background in healhcare and Raghav's and Shubham's background in material engineering and electrical engineering respectively is the perfect fit to bring out a product called DigiScope. 

We are strong believers that everyone should have healthcare access and to solve it we want to pitch our product - Digiscope.

We are engineers who are working towards alleviation of poverty through development engineering. We believe that by competing in solve, we will get in touch with potential mentors to guide our social enterprise journey, scale our product through financial support, and help us identify the missing pieces in entrepreneurship's vast jigsaw puzzle. We look forward to understanding from the Solve team, where our technical innovation holds great potential and how we can improve the design further.