E-Health: Low Cost Sensors for Early Disease Detection

The vital signs of people is crucial in today's medicine. It is also an imperative today to create a wearable electronic device in order to measure vital signs in longer period. So, to measure patients’s pulse, first you need a pulse sensor.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is the physiological phenomenon of variation in the time interval between heartbeats. The heart rate changes from moment to moment and provides a rich signal aggregating local emotional arousal and broad physiological activity. For example, in a relaxed state your heartbeat will slow down during inhalation and speed up during exhalation. During a stress, such as exercise, the heart rate will be strong and steady.

As of 2014, many consumer heart rate monitors exist on the market but they are expensive and usually do not record the beat-to-beat interval (or even make the data convenient to access).

Connection diagram is below:

You can use the processing code from pulsesensor.com (a company which built the sensor, and where you can also buy the sensor) for immediate visualization and to use for interpretation of results.

The processing GUI app is also shown below:

You can access the code below. With this code, your app should work as expected. For further work, you could integrate it with Microsoft Azure, and acces a wide range of measurements, for example get information about patients pulse in past three months, etc.