Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source Patient Monitor

July 22, 2017 by John Baichtal 24 Comments

Vital sign monitors are usually found in developed countries; they just cost too much for less affluent communities to afford. The HealthyPi project aims to change that by developing an inexpensive but accurate monitor using a Raspberry Pi, a custom hat studded with sensors, and a touch screen. The resulting monitor could be used by medical professionals as well as students and private researchers.

[Ashwin K Whitchurch] and his team created HealthyPi, a Raspberry Pi hat that includes an AFE4490 chip serving as the pulse oximeter front end, an analog to digital converter that interprets the ECG and respiration data, and a MAX30205 body temperature sensor. The hat has its own microcontroller, a ATSAMD21 Cortex M0+ that can also be loaded with the Arduino Zero bootloader.

This project is capable of monitoring a patient’s pulse, respiration, body temperature, and all the other vital signs made measure d by other ‘medical-grade’ vital sign monitors at a fraction of the cost. It’s a democratizing technology, and [Ashwin] already has some working hardware available on Crowd Supply.

Learn more about HealthyPi at the project page or download the code from GitHub.

Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source Patient Monitor” →

Pulse Oximeter Is A Lot Of Work

March 11, 2017 by Al Williams 24 Comments

These days we are a little spoiled. There are many sensors you can grab, hook up to your favorite microcontroller, load up some simple library code, and you are in business. When [Raivis] got a MAX30100 pulse oximeter breakout board, he thought it would go like that. It didn’t. He found it takes a lot of processing to get useful results out of the device. Lucky for us he wrote it all down with Arduino code to match.

A pulse oximeter measures both your pulse and the oxygen saturation in your blood. You’ve probably had one of these on your finger or earlobe at the doctor’s office or a hospital. Traditionally, they consist of a red LED and an IR LED. A detector measures how much of each light makes it through and the ratio of those two quantities relates to the amount of oxygen in your blood. We can’t imagine how [Karl Matthes] came up with using red and green light back in 1935, and how [Takuo Aoyagi] (who, along with [Michio Kishi]) figured out the IR and red light part.

The MAX30100 manages to alternate the two LEDs, regulate their brightness, filter line noise out of the readings, and some other tasks. It stores the data in a buffer. The trick is: how do you interpret that buffer? Continue reading “Pulse Oximeter Is A Lot Of Work” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Open-source Pulse Oximetry

August 19, 2015 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Chances are pretty good you’ve had a glowing probe clipped to your fingertip or earlobe in some clinic or doctor’s office. If you have, then you’re familiar with pulse oximetry, a cheap and non-invasive test that’s intended to measure how much oxygen your blood is carrying, with the bonus of an accurate count of your pulse rate. You can run down to the local drug store or big box and get a fingertip pulse oximeter for about $25USD, but if you want to learn more about photoplethysmography (PPG), [Rajendra Bhatt]’s open-source pulse oximeter might be a better choice.

PPG is based on the fact that oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin have different optical characteristics. A simple probe with an LED floods your fingertip with IR light, and a photodiode reads the amount of light reflected by the hemoglobin. [Rajendra]’s Easy Pulse Plugin receives and amplifies the signal from the probe and sends it to a header, suitable for Arduino consumption. What you do with the signal from there is up to you – light an LED in time with your heartbeat, plot oxygen saturation as a function of time, or drive a display to show the current pulse and saturation.

We’ve seen some pretty slick DIY pulse oximeters before, and some with a decidedly home-brew feel, but this seems like a good balance between sophisticated design and open source hackability. And don’t forget that IR LEDs can be used for other non-invasive diagnostics too.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

HeartBeat Boombox Creates Bio Beats

October 22, 2013 by Adam Fabio 3 Comments

sophi1

If you happened to be wandering the hall of science during MakerFaire NY, you may have noticed a woman walking around with a rather odd boombox strapped around her neck. That was [Sophi Kravitz] with her HeartBeat Boombox. Thankfully [Sophi] lives within driving distance of Makerfaire, and didn’t attempt to get through airport security with her hardware. She started with three medical grade pulse oximeters. These oximeters output a “beep” for every beat of your heart. [Sophi] rolled her own AVR board running Arduino firmware to capture pulses on their way to the oximeter audio transducer. The AVR uses a sound board to convert the pulses into various percussion sounds. The pulse indicators also activate one of three LED strips.

[Sophi’s] biggest frustrations with the hack were the JST connectors on the LIPO batteries powering the entire system. She found that they fell apart rather easily. We’ve used JST connectors in the past with no problem, so we’re guessing she ended up with one of the many knock off connectors out there. [Sophi] tied the entire system together with a custom milled acrylic plate mounted to the front of the boombox.

The final result was very slick. With three people connected to the finger inputs of the pulse oximeters, some complex beats could be formed. We thought we were listening to dubstep when she first walked by. One feature we would like to see implemented would be the ability to record and play back some of the beats created by the boombox.

Pulse Oximeter From LM324, LED, And Photodiode

April 18, 2013 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

This pulse oximeter is so simple and cheap to build it’s almost criminal. The most obvious way to monitor the output of the sensor is to use an oscilloscope. The poor-man’s stand-in for that is a sound card, which is what [Scott Harden] demonstrates in his write-up.

It uses a concept we’ve seen a few times before. The light from an LED shines through your finger and is measured on the other side by a phototransistor. It’s that light grey plastic thing you see on a patient’s finger when they’re in the hospital. [Scott] went with a common wooden clothes pin as a way to mount and align the sensor with your finger. It is monitored by the simplest of circuits which uses just one chip: an LM324 op-amp. There are three basic stages which he explains well in the video after the jump. The incoming signal is decoupled before being fed to the first amplifier stage. From there it is fed to an adjustable low-pass filter to help eliminate 60Hz noise from AC power in the room. The last stage amplifies the signal again while using another low-pass filter in parallel.

Continue reading “Pulse Oximeter From LM324, LED, And Photodiode” →

Robo Doc Reads Children’s Pulses Without Scaring Them

August 28, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

[Markus] recently took his 14-month-old daughter to the pediatrician for a routine checkup. During the examination, the doctor needed to measure her pulse and quickly clamped an infrared heart rate monitor onto her finger. Between the strange device clamped to her finger and incessant beeping of machines, [Markus]’ daughter got scared and started to cry. [Markus] thought these medical devices were far too scary for an infant, so he designed a funny robot to read an infant’s heart rate.

[Markus] liked the idea the Tengu, a robot with a LED matrix for facial expressions, and used it as inspiration for the interface and personality of his RoboDoc. To read a child’s pulse rate, [Markus] used a photoplethysmography sensor; basically an IR LED and receiver that reflects light off a finger bone and records the number of heartbeats per minute.

The build is tied together with a speaker allowing the RoboDoc to give the patient instructions, and a servo to turn the head towards the real, human doctor and display the recorded heart rate.

We think the RoboDoc would be far less disconcerting for an infant that a huge assortment of beeping medical devices, and we can’t wait to see [Markus]’ next version of non-scary doctor’s tools.

DIY Pulse Oximeter

May 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

This pulse oximeter turned out very nicely. It is based around a Freescale microcontroller and detects pulse as well as oxygen saturation in your blood. The sensor is made of two wood pieces and allows two wavelengths of light to be shined through your finger. A sensor picks up the light on the other side of your stubby digit and the readings are compared to calculate saturation. Check out the finished project after the break.

We saw an Arduino-based oximeter a few months ago. These kind biometric hacks are rare around here. If you’ve got a well documented project don’t forget to tell us about it.

Continue reading “DIY Pulse Oximeter” →