India is the epitome of heart patients, housing nearly 40 million of them.It is also noted that cardiac arrest takes one person away every 33 seconds in India, mostly due to lack of timely medical assistance and easy to use point of care medical devices that can track such calamities before hand. HD Medical is changing the way world addresses cardiac issues. Its patented Audio Visual Auscultation technology is a first of its kind to enable visual display of the activities of the heart and also document it for patient reporting and analysis, regardless of time and location. This helps medical practitioners review patients’ conditions and enable them to receive specialized remote care that invariably reduces costs and increases convenience, speed &accuracy of the medical assistance. For several multi-faceted Tele medicine clients, HD Medical has integrated this technology (customised if required) with their in-house consoles and help in capturing necessary data for assessment.

Simplifying Healthcare
Where the traditional stethoscopes

are limited to plain listening of heart sounds, this technology offers a 'dynamic' auscultation that enables the medical expert to ‘see’ the patient’s heartbeat in the form of waveform, presented in classic phono cardiogram format on an integrated visual display. This way, it combines the senses of vision and hearing to yield more accurate diagnosis. The high sound amplification (upto 30 times) with digital filtering adds critical functionality for noisy environments or when conditions limit auscultations. The output received can be transferred to a laptop where the designated software displays acquired real time heart sounds and zoom-in visualization functionality for analyzing and generating patient reports. This information can also be recorded and transmitted via Bluetooth to a smartphone that,if required, can be further shared on the remote cloud server for future references.

HD Seth’s ECG component caters to the electrical activity of the heart while the PCG component takes care of the mechanical activity

HD Medical’s advanced variant called HD Steth, which will be launched in India by the end of this year,will be a first-of-its-kind Smart Stethoscope with integrated ECG. Arvind Thiagarajan, Inventor & CEO of HD Medical, feels HD Steth will revolutionise the simple act of auscultation and propel

point of care screening to a higher dimension. Arvind contends that HD Steth will have crystal clear Smart Amplification which will amplify diagnostic sounds and cancel unwanted noise. He feels that simultaneous viewing of heart sounds and ECG in HD Steth will pave way for cost effective diagnosis at point of care. These simple yet advanced features will be of great help for Telemedicine. Arvind strongly feels that the remote monitoring capability of HD Steth will reduce read missions and provide effective home care in future.

HD Seth’s ECG component caters to the electrical activity of the heart while the PCG component takes care of the mechanical activity.“Through one simple device, we should be able to capture the activity of the heart and transfer to a specialist for a quick expert opinion,”expounds Sairam J, Country Head (India), HD Medical. Additionally, its high recording capability makes it a useful tool for auscultation teachings and tele consultations.

HD Medical, with necessary regulatory approvals, has established research collaborations with University of California, San Francisco and Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, and is now working ona futuristic product named Smart Scope that will monitor patient at home and intervene if the situation arises. “We are in talks with Government bodies to make this simple tool available at primary health centres for effective screening of heart ailments at the early stage” concludes Sairam.