Abstract
Human hearing sensitivity is frequency-dependent. The sensitivity is low at both ends of the audible frequency, and the sensitivity is the highest in the middle band at 3000 Hz. The heart sound of a healthy person is concentrated at a low frequency of 200 Hz or less, and despite using a stethoscope, the hearing sensitivity of the human body is low, and the stethoscope sound is low. Amplifying the sound of the stethoscope is not effective in distinguishing heart sounds in noisy environments because it maintains the same signal-to-noise ratio. In this study, a method of enhancing auditory stimulation was developed by applying a method of moving the spectrum of auscultation sounds into a high-frequency region where the human body is highly sensitive to hearing. The spectrum of the auscultation sound was moved up by 500 Hz in the frequency domain, and an inverse fast Fourier transform (FFT) was performed to reconstruct the auscultation sound. The heart sounds reconstructed by moving the spectra were divided into the first heart and second heart sound components, as in the original heart sound, and it was confirmed that the intensity was large in the cochleagram representing auditory stimulation. Therefore, this study suggested that spectral shift is a method to enhance auditory stimulation during auscultation without increasing the intensity of the auscultation sound.
