DEV Community

Bharat Sundal
Bharat Sundal

Posted on

Pulse Watch and Vest

Intro

Pulse is a heart rhythm monitoring band and Vest solution for both normal users and heart patients that put the complete mechanism of ECG and PPG heart monitoring together assisted with Machine learning and Cognitive thinking system to collect data on irregular heart rhythms and notify users who may be experiencing atrial fibrillation (AFib), Tachycardia, Bradycardia, Missed beats or any other heart conditions. An Abnormal Heart Rhythm also called an arrhythmia means your heart is beating too fast, too slow, or with an irregular pattern and is one of the early signs of decline in heart health, many people don’t experience the symptoms before any major complication and therefore often goes undiagnosed most of the times, which may lead fatal problems.

Heart Disease is the leading cause death constituting 31% of the total deaths in the world and therefore early diagnosis is the option for its appropriate treatment.

Pulse Watch & Vest can predict the risk of heart attack, stroke, cardiac arrest and other fatal problems by monitoring various parameters of the heart like Rhythm, Beat per minute, Depolarization and Polarization cycle, blood pumping intensity, recovery rate throughout the day. The system employs Machine learning and becomes smarter and more accurate day by day with usage and number of diverse users

Both pulse Watch and Vest are available for the same use but the Vest is specially designed for the already diagnosed heart patients because it provides more accurate data on heart rhythms and gives higher resolution in ECG graphs due to the placement of electrodes near the heart to make sure that even smaller variation will not go undetected. For the patients suffering from arrhythmia the app notifies up to 5 selected people if the user gets sudden heart attack via SMS so that required help can be received within the golden time period.
Pulse Watch can be used by normal users to keep check on their heart health and predict the possibility of coronary artery disease. Pulse watch also features a pill tray which stores the medicine "Sorbitrate" that works as a life saver during a heart attack. The devices works by pairing with an android application that displays the health statistics of the user and also give critical notification if the person is suffering from heart disease.

The project has been developed by frequent discussions with heart specialists and is based on research done by Stanford Medicine on heart patterns.

Demo Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R8P6DceUv8&t=8s

Link to Code

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nu6UBfkXvyfqxKSkCkYgnJGKZvfNtnOP/view?usp=sharing

How I built it

There are a number or iterations that took place while building this project starting of with the research of what goes inside the watch and vest and then creating a rough sketch of how all of the hardware and software pieces are linked together so as to shape an end product through which user can easily interact with. The prior work is the research of severeness of heart related diseases and how I could help patients suffering from heart-disease can add this product to their daily life so as to keep track of their heart rate and also possibly evade a condition of sudden heart failure. After all of this research work, I started working on the designing of the watch and vest. This is a crucial step as there are a number of points to consider while designing like what software to choose for designing, what material to choose for the watch and vest, how all the sensors and controllers are gonna fit inside the watch and vest, how this watch and vest would not be ill-fitted to user's body and many more. Post that, comes the phase of writing a sleek and efficient code which tends to connect the software and hardware to each other so that all the data from the hardware redirects to a smart-phone application where daily statistics can be viewed. This is the most significant part of the product as it will be of no good use if the device is not functional or giving inaccurate
results. After that comes the assembling or wiring up the micro-controller with the sensor which I hated the most because the sensors and controller I used were pretty small and wiring them made me sick. But two or three days of this hard-work paid off with a nice and good looking product that was finally ready for testing and reviews. Testing was successful and withing a month or so, I developed the complete Watch and Vest that can give comparable results to the traditional ECG Holter machines along with additional useful features.

Additional Thoughts / Feelings / Stories

The day I completed my project, I felt really happy that I garbed an extra large pizza on my way home and I watched my favorite movie "About Time" and took a nice, peaceful nap of about 12 hours.

Top comments (0)