Inspiration
Heart attack is deadly, unless someone comes to your rescue within five minutes. If you live alone, it is a serious danger. Even a non-lethal condition, such as effort-induced arrhythmia can be deadly if you fall in the stairs while searching for help.
What it does
We are building a piece of wearable hardware to seamlessly monitor your heart, inform you if you are at risk and in case things are looking really bad for you, warn people around you or call 911, so that you and those you care about are better protected, even if they spend a lot of time alone.
How I built it
We used a music amplifier board and Audacity to prototype ECG signal acquisition, Python with elements of machine learning to prototype data processing rom the registration and analysis of data and Android development toolkit to write an application to monitor the readings and send an alert to someone who could check, warn you you are undergoing heart anomaly and if you don't respond, call 911.
Challenges I ran into
Lack of sleep Couldn't figure out why we had so many messages on our phones (before we figured out it was our Android development) Android "intents" are hard to understand Amount of noise in picked up by the ECG sensors and injected by audio devices (human body is a terrible microphone) Impossible to find a two 16uF capacitance in the entire university campus and all the students inhabiting it Deciding what shade of pink to use on the slides
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Turning audio equipment into medical equipment Using Fourier transforms to get the ECG signal from unreadable to noisy, but recognizeable See the entire PQRST curve after integrating data from 30 seconds of reading Make your first mobile app Make that app use 100 different random features Jam my friend's SMS inbox Created gitub Learned how to use git and github
What I learned
Version control is vital (all hail git) Android development is hard. Even for Google engineers Some people in my team are vampires. No matter how hard we tried, we never got a proper ECG reading for them.
What's next for Beat Band
Find proper electrodes Buy A LOT of 16 uF capacitors Also buy A LOT of amplifiers Keep iterating, both the product and the business model
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