Photoplethysmography with Android Programmable
Devices for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring System
Chi Kin Lao, U Kin Che, Wei Chen, Sio Hang Pun, Peng Un Mak, Feng Wan, and Mang I Vai
Abstract—In this paper, a miniature portable heart rate detector system is implemented by modern hardware ICs and simple sensor circuit with software executable on both PC and
Android platform. The biosignal is first extracted via photoplethysmography (PPG) principle into electric signal. Then a microprocessor is used to covert biosignal from analog to digital format, suitably for feeding into an RF module (nRF24L01 for
RF transmission). On the receiver end, the computer and/or smart phone can analyze the data using a robust algorithm that can detect peaks of the PPG waveform, hence to calculate the heart rate. Some application software running on Windows and Android phone have been developed to display heart rate information and time domain waveform to users for health care monitoring. In the future, pure Bluetooth technology will be used for wireless personal communications instead of RF modules.
At the same time, the data can be sent to computer console using existing available networks (3G, 4G, WiFi, etc.) for health database logging purpose.
Keywords—Heart rate detector, Android application, healthcare monitoring, Photoplethysmography (PPG), peak detection algorithm, wearable/portable device.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Because of the rapid medical development of our modern societies, the health care system becomes much more mature and professional. Migrating regular mature in-clinic/inhospital health system to individual wearable monitoring systems for chronic disease becomes popular. This trend will go on in forthcoming years as the average number of elderly has continued to occupy large portions worldwide. In order to decentralize the current burden of public health system and promote the popularity of routine health
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