Wireless Wearable Watches Your Vital Signs

Is it [Dr. McCoy]’s long-awaited sickbay biobed, with wireless sensing and display of vital signs? Not quite, but this wearable patient monitor comes pretty close. And from the look of it, [Arthur]’s system might even monitor a few more parameters than [Bones]’ bleeping bed from the original series.

Starting with an automatic blood pressure cuff that [Arthur] had previously reversed engineered, he started adding sensors. Pulse, ECG, respiration rate, galvanic skin response, and body temperature are all measured from one compact, wrist-wearable device. It’s not entirely wireless – the fingertip pulse oximetry dongle and chest electrodes still need to be wired back to the central unit – but the sensors all talk to a Teensy 3.2 which then communicates to an Android app over Bluetooth, so there’s no need to be tethered to the display. And speaking of electrodes, we’re intrigued by the ADS1292 chip [Arthur] uses, which not only senses the heart’s electrical signals but also detects respirations by the change in impedance as the chest wall expands and contracts. Of course there’s also pneumography via radar that could be rolled into this sensor suite.

It’s all pretty cool, and we can easily see a modified version of this app displayed on a large tablet or monitor being both an accurate prop reconstruction and a useful medical device.

10 thoughts on “Wireless Wearable Watches Your Vital Signs

  1. That is not practical. When my son was 4~5 years old he sometimes had night fevers. And I wanted to sleep! So I packed a Dallas DS thermo sensor, and atmel microcontroller, an el cheapo bluetooth module and a small battery…sandwiched everything on 3M micropore tape and glued it on the boy…so i could get an alarm buzzing if the temperature started to raise and a trend curve of his temperature in the last hours, I even set up an alarm if the temperature fall below 35 (meaning that the patch felt off)…Today, with ESP8266 and other IoT chips I think its taking too long for someone pack and industrialize the idea…

    1. There are several advantages in doing that. In this case the bottom of the enclosure is the blood pressure monitor’s native case half. It has a weird curve in it which I have measured and adapted my design to. Now anyone can download the STL file from github and save some time as it fits quite well.
      As someone with technical thinking, “printing custom boxes” is actually the thing I use my 3D printer for mostly.

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