Last Updated on July 16, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
One of the pioneers of low cost high quality heart rate monitors is Scott Harden. Scott had serious medical treatements in recent years:
According to his personal web site, he is not in any immediate danger, 3 years after his autologous bone marrow transplant it now seems likely that he will require additional treatment at some point. He will update his page under:
as he learns more. If you want to know about Scott, it is best to look at his GITHUB page, as Scott says. Her is very active there:
coding currently for instance on his ScottPlot project. We wish him all the best for his health. Unfortunately, we haven’t heard of any new developements for his Sound Card ECG:
We have some suggestions:
- Scott’s ECG device is only a single-lead ECG device with 3 electrodes. To reach a better accuracy, 3 lead or channels are required. More channels can be obtained by connecting multiple AD8232 modules to the circuit of How to Electronics and stream sensor data for instance to Home Assistant.
- The AD8232 is a very affordable chip, and prices for those where stable and dropped in recent years.
- This is a sophisticated project for developers with a passion for collaborative public software and hardware development as Scott has it. But if we are on a long-term goal, we think the path Scott has chosen is an excellent path. Soldering together single components is not such a big deal, if we look at the disadvantages to depend on for instance OpenBCI module develpers with uncear goals, unclear pricing politics, and a varying quality of their modules.
- We think Scott Hardens Sound Card ECG is very well suitable for developing it further.
Our suggesting are
- replace the sound card with the circuit from How To Electronics and connect the :AD8232 over ESP 32 to Home Assistant:
- ESP32 can be bconnected to Home Assistant as in the example “Use this CHEAP Xiaomi thermometer with an ESP32 and Home Assistant” on YouTube.
- Visualize the ECG data in Home Assistant following the example for the Apple watch as shown by smartlive-net.de:
- transcript of the video in german which can be translated to your language by google translate:
- We can connect multiple AD8232 ECG modules to get a 3 lead ECG on this pathway.
- We can for instance implement respiratory rate estimation as well, and many more features.
- We can do the same with for instance an open source optical heart rate monitor and compare the data to ECG data.
- We can define 100 standard protocols from «breath meditation» for the Plum Village meditators of Thích Nhất Hạnh, for Badmington players as Swiss Benedictine monk Martin Werlen, weight lifting for the Bishop of Chur Joseph Maria Bonnemain and protocols for other athletes.
- In contrast to Rob, the paper of the Swiss Federal Institute of Sports in Magglingen publishes clearly defined protocols which is great:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31004219/
We can publish accuracy plots following Rob ter Horst, but with clearly defined protocols which we publish also on YouTube and finally write papers and submit those to Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise as the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio did. We think open source platforms do not have the many disadvantages other sensor platforms have we described in our journal. And we think especially Home Assistant is worth it to have a closer look to see if it can be modified for medical and research applications. And if no YouTube video makers can be found for this project, it is eventually a project for students, universities or research institutes.