You wouldn’t leave for work without your house keys and smart phone, you wouldn’t park your car without locking it, and you wouldn’t walk into an exam room without your stethoscope. It’s common sense.
And now, there’s a common sense must-have for that stethoscope that combines two essential tools. It’s an inexpensive gadget called an Eko Core, and it just might change your life.
The Eko Core is an electronic stethoscope attachment that can convert any analog stethoscope into a digital one. Once attached, it allows clinicians to switch between analog and digital modes with the push of a button. In analog mode, you have your familiar, trusty sidekick: the stethoscope you first learned to interpret sounds on. But in digital mode, the sound is crystal clear, background noise is filtered out, and the audio can be amplified up to forty times its original level. It also comes with a Bluetooth app that allows users to record, share and save critical sounds. The attachment is available for $199 on Eko’s website and can be purchase pre-attached to a cardiology-grade analog stethoscope for $299.
“This is the future of the stethoscope,” says Dr. Grayson Armstrong, a fellow at Harvard Medical School. He’s one of several educators making the switch to Eko Core. “It’s incredibly versatile. I can use it like a normal analog stethoscope but can easily switch to digital mode, which allows you to record heart and lung sounds, playback these sounds, and upload them to an Electronic Medical Record.”
The Eko isn’t the only one of its kind, but it seems to be the best. Other retailers have also rolled out an electronic stethoscope, but the alternative options lacks a few features that the Eko creators consider fundamental, and it retails for $100 more than the Eko. You can see the differences are detailed in this chart.
For Dr. Marc Berg, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Arizona, the value of Eko boils down to that most critical of resources: time. “I can record with a single touch and replay important heart sounds at full fidelity for my students and residents. Another click and I’ve sent this sound file to my colleagues for teaching or clinical care.”
Reviews are popping up from others in the medical community as well, including Nurse Bass and medical students Jane &, who calls the technology “a must have for medical students,” and demonstrates how easy it is to record and heart sounds during this video.
Aptly named, Enclothed Cognition is the official Medelita blog for medical professionals interested in topics relevant to a discerning and inquisitive audience. Medelita was founded by a licensed clinician who felt strongly about the connection between focus, poise and appearance.
