What does the heart rate signify? It’s a window into your muscles and lungs; it reveals how hard they are working. Your heart pounds to pump oxygen-rich blood to your muscles and to carry cell waste products away from your muscles. The more you demand of your muscles, the harder your heart has to work to perform these tasks. That means your heart must beat faster to deliver more blood.
The heart rate gives a good indication during exercise routines of how effective that routine is improving your health. Once only used by elite athletes, heart rate monitors are now becoming an essential tool for everyone from the casual athlete to the personal trainer.
Heart monitors provide an easy and scientific measure of the effort you are putting into your workouts. A heart rate monitor is simply a device that takes a sample of heartbeats and computes the beats per minute so that the information can easily be used to track heart condition. Current technology consists of optical and electrical monitors.
The electrical method provides a bulky strap around one’s chest. The optical method does not require the strap and can be used more conveniently than the electrical method.
There are many constraints in producing a heart monitor. First, the technology used to measure the pulse has to be determined. A cost efficient way of measuring the pulse is the combination of a LED and photo-sensor.
With the LED technology, ambient light causes excess noise. Therefore, a filter would be needed to attenuate the noise in order that the pulse signal can be extracted. The device must have a display or some way to observe the heart rate. The device should be accurate and easy to use to be attractive to the general public. To make an impact on the market, the design must be small, lightweight, durable and affordable. With these constraints noted, one can propose a design to produce a heart monitor.
Using the design constraints described above, we can now state how we will approach our design. The basis of our design is to construct an efficient and affordable heart monitor. A LED and photo-sensor will be used to measure the pulse by measuring the change in blood flow through one of the index fingers. A noise filter will be designed to filter out any unwanted noise and interference from ambient light.
A micro-controller will be programmed to count the pulse rate and control a LED display to show the pulse rate. The device will operate in the power range of 3 volts to facilitate battery operation. With this low power consumption, it will last for a reasonably long time under normal use. The final product will be packaged in a small, lightweight, and durable package that will be approximately 2.5” x 1.7” x 1”.
Heart monitors exist today, so our design is not the first heart monitor to be built. However, our device will apply to all ages of people who want to monitor their heart rate for any reason.
Heart monitors exist today, so our design is not the first heart monitor to be built. However, our device will apply to all ages of people who want to monitor their heart rate for any reason.
It will provide fast and accurate readings. Because of its portable size, our design can be used at home or the office or any desired location. Under the time constraints, we will only be able to produce a prototype meeting the general constrains above. Many features could be added such as wireless monitoring, ECG technology, and alarm features.
Monitoring one’s heart rate is useful not only for a patient but also for normal persons, including athletes, in order to observe the heart rate variations due to stress, exercise and concentration. For persons with illness, of course, the heart rate gives a good indication of the intensity and the stress on the heart as well. Normal heart rate for the average individual is known to be 72 beats per minute.
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