Hello all,
With the term coming to an end, this post will the the last post detailing the progress of this project. In week ten's lab, we presented our project and prototype.
The device we made for this project is now complete. It reads through the user's heart rate, identifies the peaks of the QRS complexes in the ECG signals and from that, calculates the time between each heartbeat. By doing this, the device is able to detect abnormal rhythms in the user's heart and notify the user of such abnormalities. Improvements we've made since last week's project check include adding filtering and debugging the code we had for calculating the time between the peaks in the user's heart rate. We filtered the ECG signals by calculating a moving average of the data from the sensors. This smoothed out the data and helped to ensure more accurate readings.
Though we initially hoped to develop a smartphone application to go with the heart rate monitor, there wasn't enough time for that. Currently, the device is capable of communicating data over Bluetooth. So future work on this device includes developing an app that could send a distress signal to a user's physician or emergency medical services. The inspiration for this was the fact that text-to-911 is something that is expected to be in widespread use in the next few years. Other improvements that could be made include better filtering and using better sensors with more leads. This would improve the device's rhythm abnormality detections. More can be seen about this in our final report (found in the Reports and Documents page).
