TelleHealth

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  EMT Kurutz's Initial Mockup

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  Pop-up/Modal from clicking on notification

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  Clock/Notification Screen

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  Hardware Overview

Inspiration

I discovered that my automatic blood pressure cuff had a USB port and I was curious what I could do with it. Turns out the answer was I could control the BP cuff entirely over the USB. So I looked into what other vitals instruments could be controlled by a computer, and as it turns out, quite a few of them can, so I thought it would be neat to try to build a vitals monitors out of them, then Trent came along and suggested it could be a device for patients to use to monitor themselves and send results to a doctor, then it just went from there.

What it does

At its core, it does 4 things: 1) Controlling and recording data from a BP cuff & a pulse-ox 2) Sending those results 3) Displaying notifications/reminders 4) Being a clock when not doing those other things It also has some other neat features like cycling through some nice nature backgrounds.

How we built it

The system is written in javascript/bootstrap and runs on a raspberry pi with an integrated 7" touchscreen. The BP cuff is connected through webUSB and the pulse-ox connects through webBluetooth, so this does only work with chrome. Results are sent via email.

Challenges we ran into

Oh boy were there a lot... First and foremost, only one of us knows how to code, then there were real world obligations, like family or a shift on the ambulance. But the real challenges were in the tech...

First of all: webUSB/Bluetooth is only supported by chrome, which lead us on a goose chase for a bit, on windows, the BP cuff appears as a HID device, so chrome will not let you connect to it, then there was windows updating a driver and somehow bricking my blood pressure cuff. There were a bunch of problems like these were technologies just weren't playing nice together, but we did eventually make it work at least somewhat. (The demo took 3 takes because the BP Cuff kept just tripping it's own e-stop)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm honestly just proud I made something work after all the tech problems, but besides that, this is the first time I've hacked consumer hardware and not just hardware intended for developers.

What we learned

The rest of the team learned a whole lot more about coding, I just learned that hacking consumer hardware is a pain. But on a more serious note, I learned a ton about processing the raw data received from devices that you aren't intended to receive data from, like this is a whole different level of signal and data processing to me and I do digital amateur radio as a hobby.

What's next for TelleHealth

I really want to continue refining this into a polished consumer product. I also plan to integrate a cloud portal that physicians can log into to send notification and receive vitals instead of just using email.

Built With

• bootstrap
• javascript
• microlife-bp-cuff
• php
• raspberypi
• wellue-pulseox