Keeping healthcare workers safe during COVID-19

This is the process by​ which doctors can listen to patients’ hearts and lungs while wearing PPE or from a safe distance with the use of external speakers, or earbuds or headphones that fit over or under Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

Various initiatives around PPE have been released to help doctors during the pandemic; Thinklabs One helps doctors listen to patients’ heart and lungs, which is imperative to a doctor’s ability to treat patients, particularly those affected by COVID-19. Currently in use at prestigious medical facilities including Johns Hopkins, Mount Sinai, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the Thinklabs One features more than 100 times amplification compared with a traditional acoustic stethoscope.

Conventional stethoscopes with rubber tubing are not compatible with layers of PPE, while the Thinklabs One has no tubing: just a universal size jack that can connect to speakers, headphones, or a Bluetooth transmitter to listen from a distance. This makes it easier to listen to patients’ lungs over the noise caused by the filtration and purification systems in some PPE, or set up telemedicine systems to listen to patients in separate rooms.

The Thinklabs One is used extensively in telemedicine practices, and Thinklabs has created partnerships with key video conferencing providers including Zoom, Vidyo, Vsee, and others to provide telemedicine capabilities with the device.

Thinklabs One helps hospitals manage the spread of infectious diseases, which proved essential during the biocontainment of Ebola. Thinklabs One supported doctors at hospitals that were on the frontline during the Ebola epidemic in Africa and in the US, including Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, the Nebraska Medical Center, and Emory Healthcare.

“For more than twenty-five years, we have developed and manufactured electronic stethoscopes to improve the detection and diagnosis of disease and save patients’ lives. Within one week in March, COVID-19 placed a new demand on our device: to save doctors’ lives,” said Clive Smith, CEO and founder of Thinklabs.

“Like other medical device manufacturers, we saw a step-change in demand. Like doctors and nurses on the front lines, we had to innovate in real-time, to accommodate entirely new use cases, such as doctors who wanted to listen from 25 feet away to patients sitting in their cars in a drive-through diagnostic or testing site.”

“My primary stethoscope for clinical care and teaching is the Thinklabs One, as it offers the highest fidelity auscultatory signal and the only means of projecting for all to share what I hear. It is even more invaluable and indispensable in the ICU during this current crisis, as it alone can enable immediate evaluation of clinical state at minimal exposure without loss of signal,” said Elazer R. Edelman, Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science at MIT and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Each Thinklabs One package contains the Thinklabs One Digital Stethoscope, Thinklabs Studio Performance In-Ear headphones, ​as well as Thinklink for recording on mobile devices. Accessories are offered for listening at a safe distance, such as Bluetooth transmitters, headphones, and loudspeakers.