Last Updated on August 9, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Affordable devices have a larger community, we observed this with Scott Hardens Sound Card ECG which is very popular:
But Scotts device is only a single lead ECG, and cardiologists use 3 lead ECG devices as their gold standard, which means as their most accurate device. A 3 lead ECG device is basically built from 3 separate devices which use 3 ECG chips and 3 analog to digital converters which run in parallel. A 3 lead ECG device makes 3 measurements at the same time. Sound cards are used for a cheap way for an analog to digital conversion with 16 bit. But 16 bit analog to digital converters have become very affordable. We suggest to use this instruction to replace the sound card:
ESP32 chips can easily be connected to Home Assistant, which is a bridge to this device:
We can use HeartPy as our ECG tool
box:
https://python-heart-rate-analysis-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
With these components, we can build a 3 lead ECG which eventually can compete with the devices which are used by the cardiologists from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio as far as accuracy is concerned.
These 3 lead ECG devices can also be developed further to handle noisy ECG signals:
A generally accepted highly accurate 3 lead ECG device would make accuracy studies of consumer grade heart rate monitors easier: