Last Updated on January 22, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
For our private project, we are looking for and ECG device which is suitable also for clinical applications if possible. We did not study the literature to this topic in detail. We can study Peter H. Charltons work, he did research on respiratory rate estimation from ECG devices for clinical applications.
If we did not study the literature in detail about this topic, we can buy from BIOPAC to be on the safe site. Biopac advertises to be the gold standard for 1.6 million successful lab hours:
https://www.biopac.com/wp-content/uploads/BIOPAC_BSL_04-07_Software.pdf
In the web, be found the information, that BIOPAC starts at 4000 USD. Neurospec in Stans in Switzerland gave us a quote for the BIOPAC API, wich is around another 2000 USD, to develop our own private project.
Is it not a good idea to use the same equipment as other researchers did, to publish in the same papers as they did? But if we do this, then it is not a private project anymore. Anyway, as soon as we publish something, then it is not private anymore, but published and publicly available. But this information here is a private project published on a personal website.
But all the same, we want to compete with Peter Charlton from Kings College in London for our private project. We did not yet study the ECG devices he uses. A group from the Kings Colleague in London used a iWorx TA220 to publish a paper about respiratory rate estimation in in the journal SENSORS, Basel Switzerland. The paper was about electrode placement. The TA220 has a long list of papers in which it was used in. With an iWorx TA220, we can submit our private paper to the same journals which published papers which used the TA220.
Iworx offers the ECG toolbox for 1000 USD, which does not allow scripting. But iWorx also offers us code, which allows to connect the recorder to connect to Matlab. The TA220 allows 3-lead ECG recordings with 3 separate channels which are digitally amplified separate from each other. This seems to be high quality.
There is a Matlab ECG toolbox available to analyse ECG signals. But do we need a Matlab standard edition for 1000 USD for our private project? There are other options available for ECG toolboxes somewhere in Jupiter Notebooks. Then we have HeartPy, Many great coders say, we don t need Matlab, Python can almost do anything Matlab can, and sometimes even more. This speaks for HeartPy. But we do not know, if HeartPy can be used for clinical applications. But we can do without clinical applications for our private project.Then, we can use HeartPy with the iWorx TA220.
The TA220 is 1500 USD on ebay, and new, the device costs even more. This is a lot of money for a private project. iWorx offers also other ECG solutions for Human and Large Animals, the ROAM Wireless ECG and Respiration:
But this device even looks more basic than Scott Hardens Sound Card ECG. Scotts device uses standard ECG placement, but not the iWORX ROAM. And what is iWorx hiding in the little red box of the iWORX ROAM? Is it a AD8232 chip, as in Scott Hardens Sound Card ECG? We do not know of a tear down of the iWORX ROAM, but we are convinced that there is an AD8232 chip in the little red box, as in Scott Hardens sound card ECG.
Considering these arguments, we do not see a reason to buy a BIOPAC gold standard device or devices from iWorx for our private project. The Scott Harden sound card ECG was developed by an experienced researcher, which has over 10 years of experience in developing his personal ECG device, which he published on his personal website:
The iWORX ROAM is a single lead ECG device, as Rob ter Horsts Polar H10 chest strap is a single lead ECG device. We can combine 3 Scott Hardens sound card ECG devices, according to the following instruction:
To get a 3-lead ECG device which is gold standard for HR measurements.