In aeromedical retrieval and commercial air flights, clinicians may need to perform lung or heart examinations if an emergency arises. The airplane represents a low-resource environment where auscultation may be the only available medical device to assess cardiac or lung disease diagnoses that may require immediate action. Conventional stethoscopes are essentially unusable in the aircraft cabin due to the noise.1–3

A new digital stethoscope, Eko Core 500, with active noise cancelling and heart and lung sound filters, has recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the USA.4 We used an experimental model to determine if the digital stethoscope can provide better quality auscultation than a conventional stethoscope in this challenging environment.

We performed a prospective study of a Littmann Cardiology IV and an Eko CORE 500 Digital Stethoscope in one …