Onescope: giving the two-century-old stethoscope an AI upgrade
A Geneva spinout packs a stethoscope, pulse oximeter and thermometer into one pocket device, then lets an AI model read lung sounds instead of a trained ear.
I came across Onescope while reading that the stethoscope, invented in 1816, is still the tool doctors reach for to check lungs, and that it hasn't fundamentally changed since. What stopped me was the number attached to that fact: pneumonia kills a child every 39 seconds, and a good share of those deaths trace back to auscultation being subjective, dependent on a trained ear that isn't always in the room.
Onescope, a spinout from Geneva University Hospitals founded by pediatrician Alain Gervaix, built Pneumoscope to close that gap. It's a pocket-sized device that combines three sensors in one: a digital stethoscope, a pulse oximeter, and a thermometer, so a single exam captures lung sounds, blood oxygen, heart rate, and temperature together. All four signals stream to a phone app running DeepBreath, an AI model trained on chest sounds from more than 3,000 patients across five countries, over 250,000 respiratory cycles in total.
The clever part isn't the hardware, it's what the combination unlocks. Sound alone is ambiguous (a wheeze can mean asthma, bronchiolitis, or nothing at all), but paired with oxygen saturation and temperature, the model narrows down the diagnosis the way an experienced clinician triangulates symptoms, except in seconds and without needing that clinician physically present. That's the real target: primary care in low-resource regions and remote monitoring for chronic patients in wealthier ones, two very different markets served by the same three sensors.
The device has cleared EU approval and is allowed in the US as of 2026, with the underlying AI work published in Nature's npj Digital Medicine. It's still a young company chasing a genuinely old problem, and I like that framing better than most AI health pitches I read: no new disease to hunt, just a 200-year-old tool finally catching up.