This startup wants to make listening to the heart and lungs easier with ‘Taal’ digital stethoscope

A few minutes into a conversation with Sumukh Mysore and Arvind Badrinarayanan, the duo behind the Taal digital stethoscope, one thing is clear.

“We are not a hardware or a tech company, we are more of a sound diagnostics company,” Mysore sets the tone of how the world should see Bengaluru-based Muse Diagnostics.

Mysore, who is a sound engineer and a geneticist, recalls the first time he met Badrinarayanan, a veterinarian, in 2016 at a recording studio in Bengaluru.

But Taal, unlike a traditional stethoscope, is ‘digital’ in nature and can record, store, and share body sounds.That’s where we thought a stethoscope became very interesting because now you can put this as a home tool,” Mysore explains.

“A stethoscope is that kind of a tool, which is quite diverse in function…it is not specific to one thing like a BP machine is only for BP or a thermometer which is only for fever,” he adds.

Although digital stethoscopes have been in existence for quite some time, Badrinarayanan says they are not only expensive but also cumbersome to use from the software point of view.

The first version of Taal, while still developed internally, relied on analogue chips but there was no mechanism to reduce background noise.

Taal is as small as the size of the palm of your hand with the outer casing made of medical-grade materials. It also boasts USB-C and 3.5mm Aux inputs for easy transfer of sounds to your phone and PC. “They didn’t fit into what I thought…why should a stethoscope remain the same shape as something that was invented 150 years ago,” Badrinarayanan says.

Taal’s biggest customers are telemedicine companies, reveals Mysore. However, Taal is not yet ready for general patients yet due to government approvals and the fact that the technology hasn’t matured