Short version:
☝title, something that can be clipped onto scrubs or worn around the neck. Also easy to clean - hard surfaces that can be wiped down with alcohol, no cloth coverings or anything.
Long version:
Nursing student here. Basically I’m trying to build a stethoscope that doesn’t need to be inserted into my ears.
I have some hearing loss, and currently use hearing aids, which has posed a frequent annoyance / hazard at my clinical rotations when it comes time to listen to my patient’s heart and lung sounds. I can’t use a normal stethoscope with the hearing aids in, cuz it shoves them way too deep into my ear canal (doesn’t feel great); so I’ve just been popping the fuckers out and using the stethoscope normally when needed. …but I hate doing that, cuz hospitals are disgusting - there’s literal and metaphorical shit on everything, so screwing with the hearing aids mid shift is 100% introducing pathogens into my ears.
At my last clinical site, one of the nurses had a bluetooth stethoscope that seemed like the miracle solution I needed - it’s basically a stethoscope bell with no tubing, and it pairs with bluetooth headphones. She let me try it out, so I paired it with my hearing aids, and… heart beats sounded like two pieces of metal clanking against eachother. Total flop, clinically useless. Fuck.
So I whine to my audiologist, and eventually we figure out that the issue is that heart and lung sounds range from 20-100 hz; and my hearing aids are designed to amplify human speech, which is about 300-3000 hz. The speakers in my hearing aids are not physically capable of playing heart and lung sounds (that clanky metal sound was just the tiny bit that overlapped with the hearing aid’s range). More fuck.
So, I don’t think my hearing aids are going to be part of the solution here, but I’m still seeing potential in the bluetooth stethoscopes: but instead of pairing it with bluetooth headphones, since again the ear canals are already occupied, instead pair it with a bluetooth speaker that I can clip onto my scrubs or use the kind that hangs around the neck.
Poking around the internet, there are tons of those types of bluetooth speakers, but they never seem to advertise the hertz range and I’m worried about getting a whole setup built, then running into the same issue with the new speaker not playing the sounds I need to do an actual nursing assessment. And those bluetooth stethoscopes are expensive as fuck, so if I’m going to dive in to this, I want to make sure I don’t screw it up.
What do you all think? Any brands or specific products you’d lean to?
Also, bonus question: putting yourself in the patient’s shoes: how would you feel if your nurse dropped in rocking a setup like this? If it’s playing through normal speakers, YOU the patient would be able to hear your own heart and lung sounds during my assessment - my thought was it’d be great for patient education: “That clicking sound when you exhale is called crackles, which means there’s fluid in your lungs, so…” Would that make for a decent patient experience, or be offputting or intimidating? I’ve been a surgical tech for like a decade, so my perspective is pretty skewed in terms of how much info is too much info.’
Thanks all!
I’m not a medical professional nor do I use hearing aids, so I might be misinterpreting the situation here, but are the speakers actually the problem? Presumably the other nurse’s headphones were capable of playing the sounds in that range; the problem was your hearing aid. How does having another speaker playing those same sounds help, if your hearing aid still isn’t able to correctly handle them?
It seems like what you’d actually need is something that can take in the sounds in the 20-100 hz range, but play them back in the 100-3000 hz range, so your hearing aid can pick them up, no?
Not OP, but I also suffer from hearing loss and wear hearing aids. Hearing loss in most people is not linear and certain frequencies are more compromised than others. This shows up as dips in an audiogram report. For me, I can hear low frequencies just fine. In fact, I can make out most words spoken by my male coworkers even without my hearing aids, due to their speech falling below the range of my hearing loss. I have a much harder time hearing females because their vocal range is higher in frequency so it comes through as very muddy. My hearing aids have open domes that pass sound, so they don’t act like earplugs for the frequencies they’re not amplifying.
My hearing aids also have the ability to pair with my phone and play music, but I never use it because they sound godawful because the drivers are miniscule. Fine for reproducing the mid and high frequencies required to boost audio in my hearing loss, but physically incapable of producing anything below probably 2-300 hz.
Everyone is obviously different, so not saying OP has the same situation as me, but based on their description of the problem and discounting the hearing aids as part of the solution, we’re probably fairly similar.
^that.
I can hear low ranges pretty well, to include heart and lung sounds from a normal stethoscope.
Using speakers or headphones that can play that 20-100 hz range would effectively bypass the hearing aids - they wouldn’t record or payback those sounds at all, it’d just be a straight shot from the Bluetooth speaker to my ears.