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!