What Your bowel Sounds Can Tell: The Hidden Language of Digestive Health
Journal:
medRxiv
Published Date:
Mar 17, 2026
Abstract
Purpose: While bowel sound auscultation represents a key component of abdominal examination, its utility is limited because bowel sounds (BS) are intermittent, variable, and influenced by factors such as diet and digestive state. This renders it challenging to use them for a quantitative assessment of gastrointestinal health. Methods: BS signals were recorded from 84 subjects (39 patients and 45 healthy controls) using an acoustic SonicGuard sensor and categorized into four patterns. Metadata on physiological parameters were collected to examine their influence on BS characteristics and the differences between healthy and patient BS patterns. Results: Bowel sound patterns are significantly influenced by meal timing, caffeine consumption, and medication intake. Significant differences between healthy and patient groups were also observed in sound count, duration, energy, and waveform shape. These differences were mirrored in the performance of machine learning models finetuned for BS patterns classification, with performance depending on the group used for training and evaluation. Conclusion: BS patterns present a promising quantitative indicators of gastrointestinal health when analyzed alongside relevant physiological parameters.
