Coronavirus: IIT Bombay startup designs smart stethoscopes

An IIT Bombay startup firm Ayu Devices has designed a digital stethoscope called AyuSynk. This has been deployed for remote auscultation (listening to chest sounds). The device permits storing the auscultated sound under the health record of the patient and sharing with other doctors for confirmatory opinion. Doctors make use of a stethoscope to listen to chest sounds such as crackles and wheezing that reflects with the development of the COVID-19 disease. This poses a risk to doctors from probable infections. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, various digital stethoscopes have been sent to KEM Hospital in Mumbai by Ayu Devices team.

According to Adarhsa K, founder of Ayu Devices, AyuSynk can be linked with any conventional stethoscope, to magnify chest sounds and transmit them wirelessly from patients to doctors without physical tubing. In IIT Bombay, the product was designed by him at TEPIC Lab and another innovator Tapas. The basic version of the digital stethoscope called AyuLynk can be linked with a mobile or laptop by means of a wire. The advanced version AyuSynk was designed in November 2019, to transfer data from the stethoscope to mobile or laptop via Bluetooth.

Across the country, more than 1000 units of the digital stethoscope are currently in use. Most of them are being used in primary health centres and in telemedicine companies. The Biomedical Engineering and Technology (incubation) Centre is situated at IIT Bombay. It has satellite centres in six engineering colleges and seven medical institutes across Maharashtra. The initiative is planned and backed by SandT Council of Maharashtra Government and DST, New Delhi, to intensify indigenous development of reasonable medical devices appropriate for local manufacture and use.

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