Remote ECG Heart Monitor

example of ECG waveform sampled
hardware device
electrodes stick on arms

Inspiration

Health care can be expensive and time-costly. The new technology of sensors and electronics makes remote access to healthcare data possible. Remote access of healthcare data can save a lot of money and time by its convenience and efficiency. Remote ECG is a good example.

What it does

This is a hardware based hacking. Three ECG electrodes are connected to MSP430 microcontroller and stick on left arm, right arm, and right leg of the user. The microcontroller samples the signal gathered from ECG electrodes and send it to PC through UART in a live stream. The PC receives the data and and upload it to the cloud. The patient's family or doctor is then able to access the ECG data remotely and monitor the user's heart health.

How we built it

The electrode on the leg is connected to the Ground. The difference of voltage between left arm electrode and right arm electrode is calculated as the ECG result. We use Energia to program MSP430 for analog data sampling and live plotting sampled data stream on the screen. We use a C program to save the data to a csv file and upload it to Plot.ly for remote access and figure plotting.

Challenges we ran into

The ECG electrode voltage is very weak. We tried different circuits to amplify it. Although the final result is still noisy, the trace of the ECG data is visible. The different voltage between the arms is significant.