For two hundred years, the stethoscope has asked doctors to trust their ears. A faint murmur, a whisper of fluid, a rhythm slightly off — all of it lived in sound, and learning to hear it took years at the bedside. AiSteth, from the Bengaluru startup Ai Health Highway, turns that sound into something anyone can see: a heartbeat drawn as a waveform on a phone screen, read by artificial intelligence in the moment.
The AiSteth smart stethoscope and its app, which turns heart sounds into visible waveforms. Image: AiSteth.
The company calls it India’s first AI-enabled smart stethoscope, and the idea behind it is disarmingly simple. AiSteth works both as a traditional analogue stethoscope and as a digital one: it records heart and lung sounds, sends them over Bluetooth to a smartphone, and shows them as spectrograms and waveforms — the company’s “See the Sound” approach. A frontline health worker can record a patient’s heart sounds in a village clinic, store them, and share them with a specialist in a city hospital for a second opinion, without the patient ever travelling.
Behind the screen is the company’s Murmur Analysis Platform, AsMAP, which the company says flags normal versus abnormal findings for clinicians, nurses and allied health workers. The focus is valvular heart disease — leaky or narrowed heart valves that often go undetected until they become serious — alongside broader cardio-respiratory screening. In a study at the Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research in Bengaluru, covering 869 people aged 12 to 85, the company reports AsMAP achieved a 98.34% true-positive rate for murmur detection and 99.73% specificity against echocardiogram-confirmed diagnoses, with a 99.49% true-positive rate for correctly identifying normal heart sounds.
That combination — a familiar instrument, a phone, and an AI second opinion — is built for India’s primary-care reality. The company says AiSteth is designed so that fresh medical graduates, nurses and ASHA workers can screen confidently, and so that a heart murmur found in a rural clinic becomes a referral, not a missed chance. Real-world deployment has now passed 140,000 patients screened for valvular heart disease across more than 20 Indian states, the company says, and the device carries US FDA 510(k) clearance as a Class II device alongside CDSCO licensure in India, ISO 13485 and ISO 27001 certification, and three patents with four IEEE publications behind it.
Ai Health Highway was founded by Dr (Maj) Satish Somayya Jeevannavar, a physician and former Army officer, together with co-founder Ashwin Chandrasekaran. The startup is backed by Turbostart, which led its Pre-Series A round, along with Rainmatter by Zerodha, The Chennai Angels and the BITS BioCyTiH Foundation, and its work has won the PHC Tech Challenge and the Phix AI Public Health Tech Challenge. The mission the team states is a large one: catching chronic disease early, where people actually live, before it turns into an emergency.
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What makes AiSteth exciting is not that it replaces the doctor — it gives every clinic a doctor’s second sense. The stethoscope stays exactly where it has always been, pressed to a patient’s chest. What changes is what happens next: the sound becomes a picture, the picture becomes an answer, and the answer reaches the patient in minutes, in their own village, rather than months later in a distant hospital.
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