Arduino Heart Rate Monitor

[Wolf] had a Polar brand exercise watch that wirelessly monitored a chest strap that sends it heart rate data. It sounds like there’s some way to transfer data from the watch to a computer, but it’s only meant for use with Polar’s website. He wanted to do a little more with the equipment so he ditched the watch and built an Arduino-based heart rate monitor.

He’s still using the chest strap and was happy to find that SparkFun sells an OEM receiver for it. Just add a 32.768 kHz clock crystal and an optional antenna wire and you’re up and running. Once the receiver finds a transmitting chest strap, it will pulse an output pin with each beat of the heart. [Wolf] used the D2 pin of an Arduino Uno to connect to the receiver because this pin corresponds to one of the ATmega’s external interrupts. A rolling average of five inputs are used to help smooth the display data, which is shown on the 2.8″ LCD screen seen above.

6 thoughts on “Arduino Heart Rate Monitor

  1. 5.5kHz. I really hadn’t been paying attention because I was unaware that off the shelf VLF equipment was being marketed to the to the DIY consumer. I read in another comment sparkfun may or will not be able to replenish it’s stock of the receiver, or stocking it isn’t a good return on investment. because of the low data rate capabilities of the VLF band,and that it’s not a very versatile receiver, there may be very little DIY interest in the module.

  2. I actually got the RMCM01 module from ProtoPIC in the UK, they had three modules left (of which I purchased two)… Took about two weeks to get to my door, although only two days to get from the UK to my part of the world… Go figure! :P

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