Comparison of Acoustic Performance of Different Sensors for the Purposes of On-Body Auscultation in Noisy Environments

Lung auscultation is a widely used clinical tool for quick physical assessment of the respiratory system. The ideal sensor preferable for lung auscultation would have high sensitivity to body-conducted sounds with a good resilience to airborne noise. This work envisions to benchmark different sensors starting from air coupled microphones, a bone conduction microphone, and polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) sensors on a small chest simulator in a controlled environment. The purpose of this work is to assess the suitability of different sensors, which could be used for lung auscultation both in silent and noisy environments. The proposed work evaluates the performance of different kinds of sensors in terms of their frequency response, noise resilience, and a quality metric that expresses sensor’s robustness to airborne noise.