iPods Are Heart Smart
March 27th, 2007 by Podophile
We’ve heard of baseball players using iPods to improve their pitching, and cricketers using iPods to improve their, um… cricketing. Now we have this report from Temple University about a medical professor and cardiologist there who’s using the iPod to teach his students how to recognize various heart murmurs. Michael Barrett, M.D found that by having students listen to recordings of common murmurs at least 400 times improved their ability to recognize those murmurs when using a stethoscope. Doctors are able to identify heart sounds correctly 40 percent of the time on average. Students who used the iPod training were averaging 80 percent.
For each year of medical school, heart sounds are posted online, allowing students to download them to an iPod or mp3 player. After listening repeatedly to the audio files, students’ skills are tested.
Since the release of Barrett’s first study with medical students, the demand for recordings of heart sounds has been intense. Thanks to a partnership with the American College of Cardiology, Barrett’s heart sounds can now be accessed online and are available on CD.
Barrett plans to lead another study, this time with cardiologists, at the American College of Cardiology meeting in New Orleans later this month.
Samples of the heart sounds are included with the article.
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