HeartbeatAMP

A stethoscope is one of the oldest sensing instruments in medicine – essentially a tube that routes acoustic energy from the chest wall to the ear. The signal it carries is rich: the S1 and S2 heart sounds encode valve closure timing, murmur presence, and rhythm regularity. But the information stays trapped in an analog loop between patient and clinician, with no persistent record and no visual representation.

HeartbeatAMP takes that acoustic signal and makes it visible. A standard stethoscope diaphragm is interfaced with a condenser microphone, digitized through an audio codec, and processed in real time. The system isolates the S1 (mitral/tricuspid valve closure) and S2 (aortic/pulmonic valve closure) peaks from background noise, then renders them as a scrolling spectral amplitude display on a small embedded screen.

The visualization is not decorative – it externalizes a signal that is otherwise invisible to the person producing it. Wearing the device, you see your own cardiac rhythm in real time: the gap between beats, the relative intensity of each valve closure, the subtle irregularities that a trained ear might catch but a patient never would. The project sits at the intersection of physiological sensing and personal awareness – what happens when you can see what your body is doing, continuously, without clinical mediation.