A to Z Health Guide 2007

They're fun to play with, but can iPods be educational and therapeutic too? Building on the concept that speech feedback helps stutterers process words, a University of Mississippi researcher replaced $5,000 digital-feedback devices with iPod Shuffles to help stutterers hear and simultaneously initiate certain parts of speech, particularly vowel sounds. In the small study, the subjects did seem to speak more naturally than before. Doctors themselves are finding new uses for the iPod too: a separate study found that physicians in training who listened to recorded heartbeats became better able to distinguish abnormal patterns when using their stethoscopes.