Last Updated on August 9, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Physiological sensor devices are often expensive and rarely used. We reviewed many of those and listed alternatives which are more affordable, but they are often little developed. And if we found one and wrote a positive review about it, prices for those increased. Will for instance Vernier increase the price for the Go Direct Respiration Belt since we reviewed it, altough it has issues which sould be updated?
This is punishing a reviewer for what he does, and we therefore publish mainly issues these devices have or devices which we have been given up, but others might pick them up, or devices which have reached a stable price.
An alternative to this process are open source devices as for instance Scott Hardens ECG device with the AD8232 from Analog Devices. We have here a community of developers which start with Scott Harden in Flordia, Peter Gamma in Switzerland who reviews it, Rahmat Ilias Basti in Indonesia who ports it to the Raspberry Pi, and How To Electronics from India who connects it to the Ubdots cloud, as well as the developers of the ECG remote patient monitor from India who send your ECG data over the Internet to your medical doctor. This global community of open-source developers makes devices more affordable and increases the quality of those.
We therefore suggest to go to the deepest level as developers as possible, as for instance Scott Harden did it. Following this path, we suggest to modify the Scott Harden Sound Card ECG:
With the How to Electronics circuit to replace the sound card:
Which connects to to ESP32:
ESP modules can easily be connect to Home Assistant from where sensor data can be exported to InfluxDB and viszalized in Grafana, and the heart rate can be calcutated with the Python open source toolbox HeartPy:
https://python-heart-rate-analysis-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
The costs for the electronics components of these circuits are relatively small and eventually find it’s community all over the world. We suggest therefore for instance for ECG devices to use these components as building blocks, instead of for instance BITalino, OpenBCI, HackEEG or PyEEG.
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