To build a medical or research grade ECG device for the costs of a consumer grade heart rate monitor device?

Last Updated on August 19, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

If we buy Cyton boards from eBay or Aliexpress, they cost not much more than a Polar H10 chest strap or an Apple watch. But with a little bit knowledge about how 3 lead ECG devices as for instance a TA 220 from iWorx with an iWorx ECG toolbox work, and a little bit of knowledge about who to build up the hardware for it, we can build such a device by ourselsves, and connect code examples together by ourselves. A Cyton board can be used for certain applications instead of a research or medical grade ECG device which costs wetween 1`200 USD and 47`000 USD. We4 listed such devices in this table:

90.02 Research & medical grade ECG devices which some of those were used to study the accuracy of consumer grade HRMs in different papers

This basically has been shown in this paper:

Researchers from the University of Calgary found that a 3-lead ECG device based on the OpenBCI Cyton board can be used for HRV measurements instead of an industry-standard 3 lead ECG device from Adinstruments and costs only about 4%

Sooner or later we will change to a setup which is based on InfluxDB and single ECG chips to build 3 lead ECG devices from. Should we not now start to build such a device right away? Will these open source InfluxDB devices not be stable as far as costs and quality is concerned? And ECG devices built from Cyton boards be outdated soon? We don t think we should start now with InfluxDB, as least not people which usually don’t code.

Is it now not possible also for beginners who usually don t code and which do not have a detailed knowledge about electonic chips such as the ADS1299 from Texas Instruments to connect the code examples together and the hardware to build a 3 lead ECG device based on Cyton and HeartPy wich can compete with the devices listed in the table mentioned above as far as accuracy is concerned?

To build such devices based on InfluxDB will take a little bit longer. But if instructions how to build up a 3 lead ECG device from a Cyton board are explained at the level of an Adafruit instuction or an instruction from How To Electronics, will not beginners also be able to build these devices? And as soon as instructions from Adafruit and How to Electronics are available how to build a 3 lead ECG based on InfluxDB:

How to build a physiological multi-sensor device based on InfluxDB?

, we will change to this new and promising platform.