Working on the first prototype – Day one

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Today we started doing some tests with the components we ordered to monitor:

– Heart rate

– Skin Temperature

For the heart-rate we did some tests with the pulse sensor ordered online and created by Joel Murphy and Yury Gitman.

It was pretty straightforward to plug and play. It seemed to read our pulse through our fingertip but it was not as stable as we expected and it did not really  work for the measurements in the wrist. We did not have the velcro they recommend to do the tests so we will try again next time to figure out if we can get better results this way.

Here some images:

Pulse sensor connected to the arduino
Processing application that runs with the sensor

We also tried with the infrared LED and the Light Intensity to frequency IC . We got some mesurements from the wrist but they were pretty unstable too. Building a proper encapsulation weareable could improve the results considerably, so this will be our next step on this side.

The LED and the IC are taped around the wrist pointing to the veins

For our last test to measure skin temperature we used a Thermistor  connected to the arduino:

and again we got some coherent measurements but pretty unstable.

For the future we will have to:

– Create better containers for all the sensors

– Average the lectures to have more coherent results

– Create visualizations to get more readable results and get conclusions faster