Peter Gamma (Physiologist & Director) Meditation Research Institute Switzerland (MRIS)

Which are the worst & the best devices for researchers who want to build a home lab?

Last Updated on February 13, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

The worst device

According to our own little experience, the worst device is a Raspberry Pi with Ant+ stick. Although it was develped by Johannes Bader, former PhD student from ETH Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich:

https://sop.tik.ee.ethz.ch/people/baderj/

and he wrote a blog «Track Your Heartrate on Raspberry Pi with Ant+»:

https://bin.re/blog/track-your-heartrate-on-raspberry-pi-with-ant/

on June 19, 2014, we suppose that the data from the device of Johannes Bader are not accurate enough for physologists like us, as we explained it here:

The best device

We suppose the best device which is avaiable is the device Richard Davidson PhD. has used to write his book «Altered Traits.»

In the following video Richard Davidson explains this device in the example of Mingyur Rinpoche:

Unfortunately, the Meditation Research Institute Switzerland (MRIS) cannot afford to buy this device. So we have to be content with the devices we reviewed in our journal. But which one to choose?

Peter Gamma started today to clean up his journal and give it a better structure. And he started with the ANT+ sensors. It is one of our first topics in our table of contents.

Tree years ago we asked: «What can we do with a Raspberry Pi with Ant+stick?»

We can do all the funny things which are listed there. Unfortunately none of those is easy to use for non-coders like us. So we just use a Garmin watch for activity tracking, but we miss to have these data in our own personal InfluxDB.

So we still miss a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant where all the Ant+ and BLE are connected to, which can be used with Python scripts for data analysis in the same way as we can do data analysis with the Adinstruments LabChart software. And we suppose as soon as such a device is available, we can easily find out what is more accurate, a 3 channel ECG device or Rob ter Horst’s Apple watch Ultra.