Last Updated on April 3, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
We are very happy about instructions of How To Electronics from India (or Canada? whatever) how to connect ECG modules to ESP8266 or ESP32 to an Ubdots cloud. But who wants to have his physiological data (ECG, brain waves, etc.) in the cloud? Maybe How To Electronics from India for a remote IOT patient monitor? We prefer to have these data in Home Assistant. Home Assistant is not made for physiological sensor data, it is an application for home automation. But for several sports sensor devices, there are instructions available how to stream these data into Home Assistant.
As we where facing the problem, how to get data from a Raspberry Pi with an ANT+stick to a data analysis application, Reto Röllin from Infinity Flow suddenly published an instruction on his infinity flow biking web site, how to send sensor data from an ANT+ stick to an MQTT brocker. Then, another event in the Trainer Road forum. A user reported to have found a solution to send the heart rate over MQTT to Home Assistant. As with other sports sensors which can be streamed to Home Assistant, the application is not made for this purpose, but it is the second most active Python application, and widely used, and eventually one of the easiest platform for sensors to start with.
Several sports sensors like the Apple watch can be streamed into Home Assistant. There is an instruction available for this, the link to it can be found in this journal. InfuxDB can be challenging for non-coders like us. Clear, you can simply connect the code. But it is also possible to solder a sensor to an ESP32 module, for instance a temperature sensor. Instructions how to do this can be found on YouTube. The advantage of this is, that it requires no coding, and we have also WIFI support offered by the ESP32 module. Unfortunately, the ESP32 modules have only an A/D conversion rate of 12 bit. For research applications, at least 16 bit is a good value, only 12 bit bit is a bit low. We reported about this problem in our journal.
Has How To Electronic recently read our journal? As a high school student receently has read it as well? We received a reaction from him. He is as far as we know also from India or from Tibet, according to his name, and he wrote to us, that he is interested in meditation research. We are dealing with topics as Meditation Research Institutes from India and Tibetan Buddhist monks in our journal, and we are very happy to find readers from India and Tibet who read our journal. We wrote feature requests in the Garmin forum, which were never successful. “Only one person is interested in this feature”, was the answer we received from Garmin supporters. And Garmin did not update the Varia Vision according to our wish, so that it can also be used by meditators. But instead, Garmin pulled the Varia Vision from the market.
Did now How To Electronics from India read our journal and is interested in it? If so, we would be very happy about it. Then we are not only one person anymore, but two persons, who are interested in the topics discussed in our journal. We do not know if How To Electronics from India has read our journal. But How To Electronics has recently published a video which helped us solve a problem. The 12 bit A/D conversion of the ESP32 modules is low, and we would prefer 16 bit. This was our problem. And then, suddenly, the wonderful instruction from How To Electronics from India, which shows us how to connect an 16 bit A/D converter module with 4 channels to an ESP32 module. The instruction was as if it was made especially for us. We do not know if that is true, but we are very happy about this instruction:
These 16 bit A/D converter modules are very helpful to attach physiological sensor modules to ESP32, which can be easily be paired over WIFI to Home Assistant. And once sensor data are in Home Assistant, it is also possible to export the sensor data to InfuxDB and visualize it in Grafana, as Udo Berndt’s instruction with the Apple watch has shown. This has also be discussed in our journal. We are Python and InfluxDB beginners, and we usually don t code. But if we modify the instruction from How To Electronic for the remote IOT based ECG patient monitor with an 16 bit A/D converter, we have a research grade ECG device, and we can connect our sensors to Home Assistant over ESP32. It should be possible to do this with multiple sensors, and we can then export the sensor data to InfluxDB. And if we connect multiple physiological sensor modules over ESP32 to Home Assistant, we have a multi-sensor device similar to those from g.tec medical, and can sell it for 50 000 USD:
No, no, we are only joking. But at least, this is a starting point to build such multi sensor devices.
We are amateurs in electronics, and we do not know if this is the optimal way to build a multi sensor database for physiological sensors. There are other instructions available, which can also be found in our journal. These instructions are also from a guy from India, where he explains how to read and write data to InfluxDB. We would be very happy to find more and more friends from India. Indian Yoga master Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the father of modern Yoga believed Yoga to be India’s greatest gift to the world. We do not practice Yoga, but meditation, but meditation has also it’s roots in India. And we only know of two Meditation Reserach Institutes in the world. One is in India, and the other is in Switzerland. We need more Meditation Reserach Institutes around the world, to spread meditation practices based on scientific findings widely all over the world, as the Dalai Lama the 14. has proposed. We would be very happy to find more and more friends from India, especially electronics engineers, to attach all the physiological sensors we introduced in our journal to Home Assistant to do physiology or meditation research.
We do not know which is the best way to get our physiological data into InfluxDB, maybe electronics engineers know it better. But the path over ESP32 does not require any coding. And it is an easy option to do some experiments. We are not experts about this topic, but we are beginners. For instance, we do not know, if InfluxDB is the end of OpenBCI with his multi-sensor chips. Eventually, InfuxDB with single EEG modules could replace OpenBCI. We noticed, that newer consumer grade EEG devices often have only view EEG channels. Thiese are eventually based on InfluxDB, which does not require OpenBCI multi channel modules.