Portable Heart Rate Detector Based on Photoplethysmography with Android Programmable Devices for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring System

In this paper, a miniature portable heart rate detector system is implemented by modern hardware ICs and simple sensor circuit with software executable on both PC and Android platform. The biosignal is first extracted via photoplethysmography (PPG) principle into electric signal. Then a microprocessor is used to covert biosignal from analog to digital format, suitably for feeding into an RF module (nRF24L01 for RF transmission). On the receiver end, the computer and/or smart phone can analyze the data using a robust algorithm that can detect peaks of the PPG waveform, hence to calculating the heart rate. Some application software running on Windows and Android phone have been developed to display heart rate information and time domain waveform to users for health care monitoring. In the future, pure Bluetooth technology will be used for wireless personal communications instead of RF modules. At the same time, the data can be sent to computer console using existing available networks (3G, 4G, WiFi, etc.) for health database logging purpose.