Technology from the University of London could help doctors diagnose heart disease.
"The system is designed to make it easy for doctors who normally carry around a stethoscope to record the sounds that come from the heart," Professor Mark Plumbley, who leads the Queen Mary College London work, told Electronics Weekly.
Heart specialists use a stethoscope to determine the health of individual heart valves.
In particular, the second sub-beat of the heart rhythm has two mixed acoustic parts, from two crucial valves, that specialists can separate through experience by listening to different parts of the chest.
The aim of the project, which is lead by Portugal's University of Porto, is to create a tool - called DigiScope - that can help GPs and other front line doctors who may not be heart specialists to extract the same information.
"Previous researchers have proposed a four-headed stethoscope and using independent component analysis (ICA) algorithms," said Plumbley. "In reality, a doctor is never going to carry around a four-headed stethoscope."
Instead, the project is using a modified standard stethoscope, developed by Portuguese engineers, with a single microphone and a tiny wireless transmitter, which links to a nearby tablet computer for analysis and display.
By placing this stethoscope on the chest in the four places sequentially, all the necessary data can be recorded, said Plumbley.
Queen Mary's contribution is an algorithm that can combine the four sequential recordings into a something that an ICA algorithm can get to grips with.
"We use the fact that every heart beat has nearly the same timing," said Plumbley. "Some of the bits are closer than others, so we find the bits that match and we line the rest up as best we can."
The following ICA algorithm - also developed at Queen Mary's - delivers graphs that separates signals from the individual valves.
"From the graphs we have got, you can see the two peaks of the second part of the beat clearly," said Plumbley.
These can be interpreted by the non-specialist doctor, of sent to a specialist along with the sound recordings.
"Two prototype DigiScopes are already in use to test their capabilities. The development will not remove the need for specialist cardiac units, it will simply make it easier to identify potential heart problems at an earlier stage," said Plumbley.