HealthPass

A look at the main display of the healthPass! Shows a short snippet of captured heart rate data.
A user enjoying exercising with the healthPass!
A closer look at the stylish wearable pulseSensor!
A sister module fitted with an accelerometer designed to count steps

Inspiration

Cherishing our memories from Nintendo's hit game, "Tomodachi Life", we had planned on recreating their StreetPass system, with a medical twist.

What it does

HealthPass is a portable health monitoring device that measures the user’s heart rate and displays the real-time BPM on an eInk display screen. In addition to showing the BPM, the device also draws a graph to visualize the changes in heart rate over time.

How we built it

We initially planned to have two ESP32s to communicate with each other using IR emitters and receivers, but we ran into technical difficulties that prevented us from getting the IR components to work. As a result, we pivoted and focused on building a health monitoring device using the ESP32. We used an eInk display to show the real-time data and connected a pulse sensor to measure heart rate (BPM).

We also wrote code that successfully enabled our accelerometer to track steps, but we weren’t able to establish communication between the accelerometer and the ESP32.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial plan was to have independent devices send data to each other as they passed by using IR emitters and receivers, but unfortunately it was too difficult to implement this type of wireless functionality into our project.

Alongside the difficulties of IR wireless communication, we found out that we could not use both our display and accelerometer at the same time, due to the fact that they needed the same pins on the esp32.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To list some of the major obstacles we overcame during this hackathon in order… Getting the ESP32 to connect to our computers! Despite being the very first few things needed to kickstart our development, it took us a lot of research and trial and error to troubleshoot why we couldn’t upload and read data with the ESP32, and the moment we finally got it to work was such a celebratory moment. Figuring out how to communicate with the adafruit e-ink display was a big step in having proper functionality for our system. The device was extra finicky and the lack of up-to-date documentation really slowed our progress, but once we got it down, it brought HealthPass to new heights. Connecting to and reading data from the accelerometer:

What we learned

Since this was an embedded systems hackathon, we got to practice ample hardware and software development. Working with the accelerometer was challenging and struggling at first, but we slowly figured out how to read and interpret its data for step tracking, the process gave us a deeper understanding of sensor communication and data handling. Being able to push through the struggles and communicate with each other was also an important part of learning how to work as a team through big, open-ended projects.

What's next for HealthPass

Many more features! With further development and planning, the HealthPass will soon combine the features of both the accelerometer and pulseSensor, bringing the user new functionality like step tracking, heart rate monitoring, and possibly even path tracing for hikers!