Picking up good vibrations (Image: BodyBeat)

THERE’S an orchestra playing inside your body. Chewing, breathing, your heart beating – most internal noises go unnoticed, but they carry useful information about our body’s function. Now a device called BodyBeat taps into these sounds to monitor health.

Created by Tauhidur Rahman and his team at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, BodyBeat uses a microphone strapped to the neck to listen for vibrations in a person’s skin and bone. The sounds it picks up are transmitted wirelessly to an Android smartphone, where software determines whether a heartbeat is irregular, for instance.

The system could also be used to assess lung health, says Rahman, by listening to a person’s breathing to figure out when it is laboured or short. Using a phone’s GPS sensor, it could detect when and where the wearer starts coughing, providing a way to track illnesses.


The device could listen in to a person’s breathing and warn when it is laboured or short

The current version of BodyBeat is mounted on the wearer’s neck and can be rigged to hold the microphone against the side of the neck, the jaw or behind the ear. All three locations can pick up vibrations from chewing, breathing and the beating heart.

Rahman says the team is working on miniaturising the system to make it more comfortable. He also plans to pair it with Google Glass to monitor diet. “BodyBeat will recognise when we’re eating, and then we can use Glass to take pictures of the food and send them to [crowdsourcing site] Mechanical Turk for categorisation,” Rahman says, giving the system an idea of how well someone is eating.

Another idea is to look at abdominal sounds. “Stomach sounds give us information about dietary behaviours,” says Rahman. Listening to those sounds can tell a user how their body reacts to different foods.

Shahriar Nirjon at the University of Virginia is working on a similar system. He aims to use his device to monitor the breathing of people with asthma. “It will save your data on a day-to-day basis so that when you go to see your doctor you get a better history of your breathing,” he says.

Nirjon wants to compare breathing patterns across populations, so that software can tell the severity of a person’s breathing problems. “The device will be able to provide some feedback automatically, possibly recommending that you go see your doctor right now if things are bad,” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Listen to the symphony inside to spot illness”