Thinklabs One Electronic Stethoscope Announces Innovation in PPE Compatible Technology, Keeping Healthcare Professionals Safe During COVID-19 Pandemic with Safe Distance Auscultation(TM)
NEW YORK, May 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Thinklabs One, the smallest, most powerful electronic stethoscope in the world, joins the wave of innovation that's occurring in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, announcing technological advances that helps keep healthcare workers safe during the COVID-19 pandemic by allowing Safe Distance Auscultation(TM). This is the process by which doctors can listen to patients' hearts and lungs while wearing PPE or from a safe distance with the use of external speakers, or earbuds or headphones that fit over or under personal protective equipment (PPE).
Various initiatives around PPE have been released to help doctors during the pandemic; Thinklabs One helps doctors listen to patients' heart and lungs, which is imperative to a doctor's ability to treat patients, particularly those affected by COVID-19. Currently in use at prestigious medical facilities including Johns Hopkins, Mount Sinai, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the Thinklabs One features more than 100X amplification, as compared to a traditional acoustic stethoscope.
Conventional stethoscopes with rubber tubing are not compatible with layers of PPE. The Thinklabs One has no tubing--just a universal size jack that can connect to speakers, headphones, or a Bluetooth transmitter to listen from a distance. This makes it easier to listen to patients' lungs over the noise caused by the filtration and purification systems in some PPE, or to set up telemedicine systems to listen to patients in separate rooms. The Thinklabs One is used extensively in telemedicine practices, and Thinklabs has created partnerships with key video conferencing providers including Zoom, Vidyo, Vsee, and others to provide best-in-class telemedicine capabilities with the device.
Thinklabs One helps hospitals manage the spread of infectious diseases, which proved essential during the biocontainment of Ebola. Thinklabs One supported doctors during the Ebola epidemic in Africa and at hospitals that were on the frontline in the U.S., including Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, the Nebraska Medical Center, and Emory Healthcare in Atlanta.
"For more than 25 years, we have developed and manufactured electronic stethoscopes to improve the detection and diagnosis of disease and save patients' lives. Within one week in March, COVID-19 placed a new demand on our device: to save doctors' lives," said Clive Smith, CEO and founder of Thinklabs. "Like other medical device manufacturers, we saw a step-change in demand. Like doctors and nurses on the frontlines, 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 who might be sitting in their cars in a drive-through diagnostic or testing site."
"My primary stethoscope for clinical care and teaching is the Thinklabs One, as it offers the highest fidelity auscultatory signal and the only means of projecting for all to share what I hear. It is even more invaluable and indispensable in the ICU during this current crisis, as it alone can enable immediate evaluation of clinical state at minimal exposure without loss of signal," said Elazer R. Edelman, Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science at MIT and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Each Thinklabs One comes with Thinklabs Studio Performance In-Ear headphones, as well as Thinklink for recording on mobile devices. Accessories are available for listening at a safe distance, such as Bluetooth transmitters and extension cables.
About Thinklabs
Thinklabs was founded in 1991 by Clive Smith, an electrical engineering graduate of Caltech. In the mid 90's, Smith read a paper in the journal Circulation, indicating that stethoscope acoustics had essentially not improved since Rene Laennec built the first stethoscope in 1816. Contemporary physicians confirmed that even top-of-the-line conventional stethoscopes did a poor job of amplifying heart and lung sounds, so Smith went to work to reinvent the vital medical tool.
After years of research, Smith found that he could detect the vibration of a stethoscope diaphragm using a high-intensity electric field--almost one million Volts per meter. The result: the electromagnetic diaphragm that's key to the audio quality of every Thinklabs digital stethoscope. The Thinklabs One marks a paradigm shift in stethoscope design--a bold move to eliminate the hollow tube styling that predates the American Civil War. The Thinklabs One has since been used as a reference in more than 300 peer-reviewed academic journal papers authored by researchers around the world.
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