Measuring meditation with a heart rate

meditation

We’ve seen our fair share of builds over the years that attempt to peer inside a user’s head and divine their state of mind. Whether the goal is to induce lucid dreaming or just reduce anxiety, we’re always impressed with how many ways you can detect moods with physiological measurements.  [Kirk] has been measuring his own physiology for months, and … Read the rest

Fitting a cold, metal heart in an Altoids tin

sim

[James] has been building a heart rate monitor using a very cool TI chip. He needed a way to test his device, and commercial ECG simulators, like all biotech devices, are absurdly expensive. [James] decided to build his own heart rate simulator, and in the process made a great tool and one of the most well documented projects we’ve … Read the rest

Measuring a pulse with infrared light

The next time you’re unfortunate enough to make your way to a hospital, emergency room, or urgent care clinic, you’ll be asked to attach a small pulse monitor to your finger. The device the nurses clip on to one of your remaining digits is called a photoplethysmographic sensor, and basically it is able to read your pulse through reflected light. … Read the rest

Monitor your heartbeat with a webcam and a flashlight

After seeing some heart rate monitor apps for Android which use the camera and flashlight features of the phones, [Tyson] took on the challenge of coding this for himself. But he’s not using a smart phone, instead he grabbed a headlamp and webcam for his heat rate monitor.

To start out he recorded a test video with his smart … Read the rest

Pushing chest strap heart rate to a stock exerciser display

This hack came out so well that [Levent] wishes he had tried it years ago. When exercising he wears a Polar heart rate monitor which sends data from a chest strap to his wristwatch. But his exercise bike also has a heart rate readout that depends on your hands touching metal contacts on the handlebars. He set out to see … Read the rest

Fingertip heart rate monitor

[Embedded lab] has a nice tutorial on building your own heart rate monitor. The monitor works by shining infrared light into the fingertip and looking at the changes in the reflected infrared signal caused by a heartbeat.  The IR detector produces a very small AC signal so a couple of op-amps are used to filter and amplify the signal. … Read the rest

The quest to build a better Stairmaster

[Eric Feldman] likes to use the Stairmaster in his exercise routine during the winter months. But apparently the exercisers that are designed for mere mortals don’t satisfy his need to climb stairs really, really, quickly. After mastering the upper speed limits of some top-of-the-line equipment he contacted the company asking if there was a way to unlock the software-imposed speed … Read the rest