A NOVEL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF
A SINGLE CHANNEL INTEGRATED DIGITAL BODY SOUND
DATA ACQUISITION DEVICE
Ali Alouani, Omar Elkeelany and Mohammed A. S. Abdallah
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,Tennessee Technological University,Cookeville, TN 38505,USA
Keywords: Integrated Data Acquisition, Network-ready Medical Device, Systems-On-a-Chip, FPGA, Flash memory.
Abstract: This paper discusses the design, development, and testing of an integrated compact digital stethoscope
capable of performing body sound measurement and processing without the need of a personnel computer
and hardware interface. The cost of the proposed device is a fraction of that of the data acquisition system
used with current digital stethoscopes to collect body sound, such as lung sound, in a digital format.
Preliminary testing of the device shows faithful reproduction of the body sound signals used. Not only the
new design strategy saves hardware, space, and power consumption but also it allows for the signal
processing and data interpretation in the same device. This is due to the proposed integrated design of the
subsystems involved in the data acquisition process. It also has the capability of sending collected data to
remote location through the Internet.
1 INTRODUCTION
Auscultation is the most popular method for the
diagnosis of pulmonary dysfunction. The breath
sound that originates in the lungs was first
subjectively acquired by a stethoscope and it is at
present the most effective mechanism for the
analysis of lung sounds by human audition. Lung
sounds are used to detect diseases such as the
obstruction during bronchial provocation testing.
They have drawn much attention because it does not
require maximal breathing effort and can therefore
be used with young and elderly patients (Oavriely,
N., 1996). In recent years, the diagnostic power
using auscultation has significantly improved
because of the advances in data acquisition, digital
signal processing and signal analysis. (Cohen, A.
and Landsberg, D., 1984)( Cohen, A., 1986)(
Druger, O., 1973)( Hartman, X., 2001)( Kiyokawah,
H., Yonemarum, M., Horie, S. et al, 1995)( Kraman,
S.S. and Austrheim, D., 1983)( Lehrer, S., 1989)(
Urquhart, R.B., McGee, J., Macleod, J.E., Banham,
S.W. and Moran, F., 1981)
Current digital measurement of body sound
requires a personnel computer and a data acquisition
system beside the stethoscope, see Figure 1. The
current technology is cumbersome and expensive.
The cost of the data acquisition card used by one of
the authors, (Alouani, A.T. and A. Kamal, 2006), to
collect digital lung sound was over $1,400 (National
Instruments, 2007). Nowadays, handheld devices
like Personal Digital Assistants, cell phones, and
other handheld gadgets use sophisticated chip
technology, which allows for lightweight, compact
and very limited power consumption. Field
Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology is
currently used in these devices. Not only this
technology consumes power in milli watts but also it
allows the integration of processing power, on-chip
memory and various control interfaces.
The objective of this paper is to design,
implement, and test an integrated digital stethoscope
capable of acquiring body sound in a digital format
without the need of a data acquisition system or a
personnel computer. Using the great computational
power of modern FPGAs, the proposed device is
capable of performing the desired signal processing
and analysis of the lung sound. The total cost of the
proposed body sound measurement and processing
device is expected to be a fraction of that of the
existing data acquisition system (National
Instruments, 2007).
This paper is organized as follows: section 2
reviews the basics of the FPGA highlighting its
capability for integration and compactness. Section 3
contains the conceptual design of the proposed body
244
Alouani A., Elkeelany O. and A. S. Abdallah M. (2008).
A NOVEL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SINGLE CHANNEL INTEGRATED DIGITAL BODY SOUND DATA ACQUISITION DEVICE.
In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices, pages 244-249
DOI: 10.5220/0001045902440249
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

sound measurement device. Sections 4 and 5 discuss
the hardware implementation and testing of the
device. Then, section 6 contains the conclusions and
discussions.
Figure 1: Digital Body Sound Measurement Using Current
Technology.
2 FPGA OVERVIEW
FPGA is a programmable integrated circuit that is
manufactured with high density of internal blocks.
Typically, an FPGA is made up of digital signal
processors (DSPs), configurable logic blocks (CLB),
memory cells, input output blocks, and
microprocessors (Xilinx Inc. 2007), see Figure 2. By
configuring these blocks, the FPGA is capable of
communicating with external peripherals, processing
and storing data.
The FPGA is a stand-alone reconfigurable
system-on-chip with the above capabilities. Using
this FPGA technology, the development of new
applications becomes very affordable. Examples of
advanced commercial FPGA-based low cost battery
operated handheld devices are Personal Digital
Assistants (PDAs), cell phones, and MP3 players.
Figure 2: Advanced FPGA technology can have embedded
memory, Central Processor, Digital Signal Processors
(DSP), input/output (I/O) blocks, interconnects, and
configurable logic blocks (CLB) in one chip.
3 CONCEPTUAL DESIGN
Existing computer based data acquisition systems,
such as the portable digital stethoscope system
shown in figures 1 or the portable EEG system
(
Comet®, 2007) shown in Figure 3, are complexes of
many components. A general structure of such
systems is shown in figure 4. The sensor(s) output is
connected to a dedicated Analog/Digital (A/D)
converter. The A/D converter sends data to a
computer. The computer analyzes the acquired
signals using its signal processing and decision
making capabilities. The computer system contains
programming memory, storage memory (i.e., hard
disk) and is connected to the internet through its
internal network interface card. Even though these
systems are portable, they are quite cumbersome and
expensive. In addition, their power consumption is
much higher than that of handheld devices.
The cumbersomeness of existing portable
medical data acquisition devices is due to the lack of
integration and the reliance on a personal computer,
Figure 3. The connections between the different
subsystems require special cables and at times
connection boxes, such as the one in Figure 1. On
the other hand, the FPGA allows for the integration
of various components on one chip. In addition, it
has all the processing, storage and display
capabilities needed by a medical data acquisition
system. Finally the proposed device is Internet
ready. This research provides a new design
philosophy that takes advantage of the capabilities of
the FPGA to eliminate the need of a computer and
cable based connection between subsystems. This
new design strategy is summarized in Figure 5.
Figure 3: Comet® portable EEG with, stimulator, and
isolated power supply (Comet®, 2007).
A NOVEL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SINGLE CHANNEL INTEGRATED DIGITAL BODY SOUND
DATA ACQUISITION DEVICE
245

Figure 4: Existing Body Sound Data Acquisition System.
4 HARDWARE DESIGN AND
IMPLEMENTATION
A centre piece of the proposed compact body sound
data acquisition system is the FPGA. The FPGA
communicates directly to the A/D converter. The
proposed FPGA design includes an A/D
configuration module, which issues configuration
words containing desired A/D sampling rate,
resolution, gain, etc. Also, the FPGA collects data
from the A/D converter, via the Data Recording unit.
Preliminary digital signal processing, such as power
spectrum density computation and display can be
done by the FPGA data processing unit. Writing the
processed data into the Flash memory device takes
more time than that of all operations preceding it.
So, care is given to the design of the Data Recording
unit, to avoid timing problems. It is advantageous to
use the FPGA's internal memory cells for buffering
because their access time is much smaller than that
of external memories. However, FPGA's internal
memories are limited. External off-chip memory is
used to store the sound samples in a buffer of large
blocks of data. As this buffer is filled, the write
operation is performed for the entire buffer. This
ensures the continuity of recorded data. The size of
the whole buffer is set to sufficiently hold a
contiguous useful data set from a body sound site.
Of course, the maximum size of the buffer is limited
by the size of the external memory. The Data
Recording unit writes the collected data into the
detachable external Flash memory device for further
analysis. The Data Recording unit follows an error
detection algorithm in the data writing process to
ensure the integrity of the stored data.
Particularly, the FPGA writes acquired data after
filling data buffer. In order to optimize the acquire-
and-write processes, the Data Recording unit can use
single or multiple block writing mechanisms. Data
block writing uses an integrity check value (Cyclic
redundancy check) at the end of each block. In
multiple block writing, the total write time is
reduced significantly by use of a more sophisticated
write mechanism. The time reduction is important as
it allows for fast A/D sampling rate. This will in turn
improve the faithful reproduction of the acquired
data.
4.1 Design Requirements
Mixed FPGA hardware/software architecture is
employed using Hardware description language
(HDL). As a rule of thumb, all time-critical tasks are
implemented in hardware, while other functions are
developed in software using embedded C
programming language. For example, the software is
used to process the captured data, while the
hardware is used to configure the A/D converter, and
provide proper timing signals. The FPGA bus
signals and the parallel input output lines form a
common interface between the hardware and the
software components.
In traditional systems, Flash memories are
written by a host personal computer, through a
permanent interface (i.e. soldered chips on circuit
boards). Such use of Flash memory devices is
common in embedded systems to store configuration
information.
A/D converter
FPGA
Processing
Data
Storage
Data
FLASH
Single Channel Integrated Digital Body Sound Measurement Device
Data
Recording
Body Sound Signal
Graphical
LCD
Display
Internet
Ready
Network
Controller
Figure 5: Proposed Integrated Body Sound Data Acquisition System.
BIODEVICES 2008 - International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices
246

One design choice made here is to use detachable
Flash memory devices. Sampled data must be
written to the Flash memory device to allow further
remote analysis and interpretation. This introduces
various technical design challenges. Particularly,
Flash memory must be written by a customized
hardware not by a personal computer. Hence, the
proposed Compact Body sound Data Acquisition
System must address the following design
requirements.
4.1.1 High Data rate
A Detachable Flash memory should have a small
and robust physical interface. This limits the
maximum number of data and control pins in the
interface. Consequently, this affects the writing
speed, as serial data communication must be
employed. We have used high clock frequency in
serial mode to overcome this challenge. Timing and
clock signals between the FPGA and the A/D
converter are properly matched. We have used Phase
Locked Loop (PLL), and clock dividers to achieve
this matching.
4.1.2 Data Integrity
Flash memory must be initialized before the storing
process. As Flash memory cards are detachable, card
detection and initialization are required. The storing
process can not be done unless the Flash memory is
initialized. Continuous monitoring of the Flash
memory during both the reading process and the
writing process is done to ensure that the data is
passed to the Flash memory. We have used Error
check code to check the valid arrival and storage of
the data into the Flash device.
4.1.3 Data Quality
The writing process is limited by the access time of
the Flash memory device (typically 10 to 200 µs
(
Western Digital, 2007)). High quality data should be
received fully (without dropped blocks), in proper
order and in time. There is no need to store data
which is incomplete or out of order. One solution we
have used is to use internal buffer. We assume no
data compression, and fixed data arrival rate. We
have made sure that the processing rate is faster than
the arrival rate. In future work, we will consider
variable data arrival rate (e.g. compressed data), and
will evaluate the optimal buffer depth, such that no
blocks are dropped.
4.2 Design Implementation
Firstly, the Altera SoPC ™ builder is used to layout
the contents of the FPGA; the NIOS-II processor,
peripheral components and memory cells, as well as
the custom hardware logic we have designed. The
FPGA layout is compiled and mapped to the target
device in the Altera Quartus environment. Finally,
the NIOS-II integrated development environment
(IDE) is used to design the software components of
the FPGA.
The NIOS-II processor core is connected to rest
of the FPGA components through the Altera Avalon
bus interface. The Avalon interface contains the
arbitration logic to manage various module
connections (
Altera Quartus II, 2006) (Sadik C. Esener,
2006
). The NIOS-II processor is a 32-bit Reduced
Instruction Set processor. Since the NIOS-II
processor follows Harvard Memory architecture, the
data and the program are stored on separate
memories. It has a 4-KB instruction cache and a 2-
KB data cache. The processor runs on 50 MHz clock
frequency.
The A/D converter used in the proposed system
is a WOLFSON WM8731. It can support a range of
sampling frequencies from 8 KHz to 96 KHz. It has
internal digital filters to improve the sound quality.
Sound data is fed to the NIOS-II processor in FPGA
serially (
Altera DE2, 2006).
The proposed system stores body sound input
signals in pulse code modulation using the Wave
(.wav) file format (
Bashir A., 2007)( Wolfson
Microelectronics, 2006). The sound is stored as a 16-
bit mono with a sampling frequency of 48 KHz.
5 EXPERIMENTAL TESTING
Figure 6 shows the proposed system prototype
implemented using FPGA. The produced prototype
uses only 15% of the total chip capacity that is 5114
out of the 33,216 Logic Elements of the Altera
Cyclone-II EP2C35F672C6 FPGA chip. The worst-
case prorogation delay observed for the system is
12.04 ns, which is less than the 50 MHz clock period
of 20ns. The Cyclone-II FPGA consumes as low as
12 mW of power, which rivals semi-custom ASIC
counterparts of similar cost.
Several tests have been performed using this
prototype. We have used the existing computer
based system to acquire a lung sound. The same
signal was provided to the newly designed device,
figure 6. Only the results of one experiment are
reported in this paper.
A NOVEL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SINGLE CHANNEL INTEGRATED DIGITAL BODY SOUND
DATA ACQUISITION DEVICE
247

Body sound Data
Acquisition Prototype
Digital Stethoscope
(Sensor)
Figure 6: FPGA prototype of the Integrated Data
Acquisition System.
The computer based system acquired the lung
sound shown in figure 7. The experiment run length
is 2.6 seconds (horizontal axis). Plotted on the
vertical axis is the normalized signal amplitude. The
data recorded using the proposed integrated data
acquisition system is shown in figure 8. Figure 9
provides a zoomed in view to show the faithful
reproduction of the body sound signal.
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
Time(s ec )
Signal amplitude
Computer based sampled data
Figure 7: Data recorded using the existing Data
Acquisition System.
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
FPGA sampled data
Time(s ec)
Signal amplitude
Figure 8: Data recorded using the proposed Compact
Integrated Data Acquisition System.
6 CONCLUSIONS
This paper provided a new design philosophy of
future integrated and compact medical data
acquisition systems. The design takes advantage of
latest development in the system-on-chip
technology.
In this paper, the design, development, and
testing of the body sound measurement device took
place using the Altera development board. The
design of an optimized custom board for this
application is underway. The new board will
eliminate components, such as off-chip-memory
devices, extension header network ports, that are not
needed by this device. In addition, the sound sensor
(microphone) will be integrated in the new board.
This will eliminate the need for the stethoscope,
which in turns reduces the cost of collecting digital
body sound.
This new design direction in medical data
acquisition systems saves hardware, power
consumption, and more importantly money. Future
work will focus on developing universal medical
data acquisition systems using the design philosophy
reported in this paper. It is believed that the long
term benefit of this research will provide affordable
handheld medical data acquisition systems with
remote data transfer capability. This will in turn
make health screening affordable and feasible from
the patient location.
0.135 0.14 0.145 0.15 0.155
-0.1
-0.05
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
Time(s ec )
Signal amplitude
Computer base & FPGA sampled data
Figure 9: (Time zoom) Superimposed Data recorded using
both Data Acquisition Systems.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and the
Centre for Manufacturing Research (CMR) at
BIODEVICES 2008 - International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices
248

Tennessee Technological University for their
support to this work. The authors also would like to
acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of this paper
for their suggestions and advices.
REFERENCES
Alouani, A.T. and A. Kamal, 2006. “ Pulmonary Tumor
Detection Using Respiratory Lung Sound,” Proc.
Cairo International Bioengineering Conference, Cairo,
Egypt.
Altera DE2, 2006.“Using the SDRAM Memory on
Altera's DE2 board with Verilog Design”.
Altera Quartus II, 2006. version 6.0 Handbook, Volume 4:
SOPC Builder.
Bashir A., 2007. ”Wave File Format.” Internet: http://
technology.niagarac.on.ca/courses/ctec1631/WavFileF
ormat.html
Cohen, A. and Landsberg, D., 1984. “Analysis and
Automatic Classification of Breath Sounds”, IEEE
Trans. Biomed. Eng., BME-31, pp. 585-590.
Cohen, A., 1986. Biomedical Signal Processing, CRC
press, Boca Raton, FL.
Comet®,2007. portable EEG and PSG system.
Druger, O., 1973. The Chest: It’s Sign and Sounds,
Humetrics, Los Angles, CA.
Hartman, X., 2001.Cross Correlation in Signal, Sound and
Sensation, New York. AIP, 346.
Kiyokawah, H., Yonemarum, M., Horie, S. et al, 1995.
“Frequency Analysis of Crackles Recorded with a
Stethoscope-Equipped Recorder”, Nippon Kyobu
Shikkan Gakkai Zasshi, 12, pp. 1341-1347.
Kraman, S.S. and Austrheim, D., 1983. “Comparison of
Lung Sounds and Transmitted Sound Amplitude in
Normal Men”, Am. Res. Respir. Dis., 128, pp. 451-454.
Lehrer, S., 1989. Understanding Lung Sound, W.B.
Saunders, Philadelphia, PA.
National Instruments, 2007. Data Acquisition Card for
Laptops and PDAs, Internet: http://sine.ni.com/nips/
cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/13122.
Oavriely, N., 1996. “Analysis of Breath Sounds in
Bronchial Provocation Tests” (editorial), Am. J.,
Respir. Crit. Care Med., 153, pp. 1469-1471.
Sadik C. Esener, 2006. ”Flash memory cards. “Internet:
http://ww.wtec.org/loyola/hdmem/01_01.htm#f01_01
Urquhart, R.B., McGee, J., Macleod, J.E., Banham, S.W.
and Moran, F., 1981. “The Diagnostic Value of
Pulmonary Sounds”, A preliminary Study by
Computer Analysis, Comput. Biol. Med., 11, pp.129-139.
Western Digital, 2007. “Western Digital Caviar RE2
WD4000YR.” Internet: http://www.storagereview.com
/articles/200510/WD4000YR_2.html.
Wolfson Microelectronics, 2006. WM8731/WM8731L,
Production data, Rev 3.4.
Xilinx Inc. 2007. "The 65nm Virtex-5 SXT FPGA"
Internet:http://www.Xilinx.com.
A NOVEL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SINGLE CHANNEL INTEGRATED DIGITAL BODY SOUND
DATA ACQUISITION DEVICE
249