Last Updated on September 3, 2022 by pg@petergamma.org
1. Bitalino ECG
For us, the advantage of Bitalino ECG are
- LabStreaming Layer support
- two accuracy validation papers
- a number of papers in which it was used.
disadvantages:
- Bit rate is a bit low, only 10 to 12 bit, there is a 16 bit single channel device available
- Bitalino HRV Toolbox: it is not clear how effective the ECG motion artifact removals are
- HeartPy would be better for it, but is not validated for BITalino
- Validation paper in Sensors is for Psychopisological Resarch
- A more general validation paper with for instance a Biopac device in a high quality journal would be helpful.
2. Scott Hardens, PhD. MD, Sound Card ECG
Scott Harden is an experienced biological research scientist with a passion for collaborative public software and hardware development. In the last year, he made 6,463 contributions, as we can see on his GITHUB page, which is highly collaborative:
He worked for many years on his Sound Card ECG, starting from his first Protoype on Jan 20, 2009:
to the latest release of the device on Mar 16, 2019:
There are at least 12 Youtube videos from Scott available since the release of his protype. This is a mature device, as Bitalino. For devices with the AD8232 and Sound Card devices, there are also two validation papers available.
Dissadvantages:
- It has not yet been used in high quality journals, so that it can be used as a generally accepted high quality reference device for instance for sports sensors validation
- Missing connectivity, like LSL, MQTT or ESP32 integration to Home Assistant and InfluxDB
3. AD8232 & ESP8266 ECG
Scotts device can be modified to connect over an ESP8266 to Home Assistant or InfluxDB to run wirelessly. There are other devices available which can do this with great instructions, the AD8232 & ESP8266 ECG. But the Sound Card ECG is a good starting point. There is Windows Software available which shows the heart rate in real-time, which the other devices do not have by default. A combination of several devices might be a good solution.
Conclusion
Developers, consider all of these devices. None of these is a Gold Standard Device which could be used for instance for sports sensors accuracy validations without limitations. For none of these is an ongoing developing community present, as far as we know. None of these low-cost high quality ECG devices can convince us completely. Keep Calm, do it yourself, might be the solution. By updating the devices with new soft- and hardware components, and fuse the positive components of the different devices into one device. To develop a great device with a great instruction, which is attractive for developers and testers.