It has hung round the necks of doctors and nurses for almost 200 years, but the stethoscope may soon be a thing of the medical museum.

Researchers claim that even the most up-to-date electronic stethoscopes are no match for an MP3 player. Neil Skjodt, from the University of Alberta, Canada, argues that off-the-shelf music players can help doctors to record a variety of respiratory noises simply by pressing the machine’s in-built microphone directly to a patient’s chest.

“The quality, clarity and purity of the loud sounds were better than I have ever heard with a stethoscope,” Dr Skjodt told the European Respiratory Society’s annual congress in Stockholm, Sweden.

Another big advantage of the MP3 player, he said, is that these recordings can then be stored and sent to a specialist, analysed using more sophisticated software, or added to a patient’s files for future reference.

Frans de Jongh, a respiratory physiologist at the University of Amsterdam, said that using MP3 players in listening to chest noises had merit. But he said that, as with stethoscopes, accurate assessment of a patient’s condition depended on expert interpretation of sounds by the doctor listening.

Explore Health News

• Swine flu

Times Recommends

• Foxy Knoxy snared by her lust and her lies
• Britain is the land of the shrinking family
• Zac Goldsmith: Not such a green god