Portable Wireless Health Monitoring System

Portable Wireless Health Monitoring System by Eliza Amancio

Heart disease is the number one global cause of death for both men and women and a common issue is the delay in medical treatment due to the lack of an early detection of the problem. Thinking of how the first moments after a heart attack, for example, are the most essential in preventing permanent heart damage, the idea of this project was to build a portable electrocardiogram device that can help people monitor and get valuable information about their heart's actions, such as an early warning of a heart attack. This can be done by continuously collecting and analyzing the PQRST wave. In the future, this could be implemented on a wearable device, like a smartwatch, that upon automatic detection of serious irregularities would quickly request medical help, diminishing the help time and, thus, possible sequels. During the four weeks of this research, the main objectives were to build a background by getting familiar with the components to be used and theories to be applied. Then, to implement it, collect and sample the ECG signal, process the data in order to identify irregularities, send the ECG signal and diagnosis to a smartphone wirelessly using Bluetooth and implement an app to display the data and the results. And finally, to research about future implementations and reliability of a system like this. Right now, the system is able to collect the electrocardiogram signals, do some processing on the data and communicate through Bluetooth with mobile devices. The next steps are to develop the mobile app for proper display of the results and to implement a more powerful data processing.

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