Thinklabs, a Colorado-based company, recently announced its digital stethoscope Thinklabs One is safe for use on COVID-19 patients. The device, which was first introduced in 2014, allows doctors to listen to a patient’s heart and lungs while wearing personal protective equipment (PPE). Alternatively, doctors can stand at a safe distance from the patient, including a location in another room.
“Within one week in March, COVID-19 placed a new demand on our device: to save doctors’ lives. Like other medical device manufacturers, we saw a step-change in demand. (Just as) doctors and nurses on the front lines, we had to innovate in real-time, to accommodate entirely new use cases, such as doctors who wanted to listen from 25 feet away to patients sitting in their cars in a drive-through diagnostic or testing site,” said Clive Smith, CEO and founder of Thinklabs.
Protective measures that can be used with the One include disposable covers like an ultrasound condom. The One’s ability to amplify sound by over 100 times eliminates concerns about the barrier’s diminution of sound quality. The One can also be cleaned easily and quickly with standard hospital wipes. The device is designed with smooth surfaces and high quality materials, including a sapphire crystal display and a chrome-plated aluminum body.
The One is currently in use at a number of prestigious medical facilities, including Johns Hopkins, Mount Sinai, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. In previous years, doctors at hospitals on the frontline during the Ebola epidemic in Africa and in the U.S. used the One during the biocontainment of Ebola. At this time, the One was utilized at the Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, the Nebraska Medical Center, and Emory Healthcare.
The One’s Unique Design
The One differs from a standard stethoscope because it lacks earpieces and tubing. The key part it has in common is the diaphragm—the flat, circular piece placed on the patient’s chest. Just as the diaphragm in a standard stethoscope, this part of the Thinklabs One picks up high-frequency sounds from the heart, lungs, and other organs.
The One has a universal size jack that can connect to speakers, headphones, or a Bluetooth transmitter. This feature allows a doctor to listen from a distance. The ability not to stand close to a patient makes it easier to hear organ sounds over the noise caused by the filtration and purification systems of some PPE. This aspect also helps doctors set up telemedicine systems to listen to patients in separate rooms.
The One is currently used extensively in telemedicine. Thinklabs has partnered with a number of video conferencing providers, including Zoom, Vidyo, and Vsee, to improve the quality of telemedicine appointments.
The One’s Capabilities
The One further differs from a traditional stethoscope in that it has audio filtering options to isolate particular sounds like a heart murmur. In addition, it can connect to tablets and smartphones to display the waveform of the audio using Wave, a matching app. Wave allows a doctor to record and locate specific spots on recordings. The One can send sounds via email or instant messaging on an iPhone or iPad.
Doctors are currently using the One a number of ways. A doctor in the same room as a patient can use the One while wearing disposable earbud headphones inside PPE or headsets over PPE. If the doctor wears headphones inside PPE, the earbud or headphone cable is then snaked out of the protective clothing to be connected outside of the clothing to the One. The doctor can then listen to the patient’s organ sounds while fully suited.
Doctors are also using the One to treat multiple infectious patients with the help of Ziploc plastic bags. The process starts by connecting the stethoscope to a Bluetooth transmitter. The One is then placed inside of ten resealable Ziploc plastic bags. The bags are sequentially removed to reveal a clean surface for listening to patients. This method works well for emergency department and primary care patients. Here protection is highly desirable but PPE is impractical.