Simple And Inexpensive Heartbeat Detector





8 thoughts on “Simple And Inexpensive Heartbeat Detector

  1. I was just looking into these things. I found the SMS BioSport In-Ear Headphones, which just plug into your phone and allow apps like Runkeeper to measure your heart rate. I believe they do this by measuring the pressure created in your ear by your moving eardrum. Seeing as it just plugs into your phone and doesn’t need any batteries or other extra power source, I wonder if it would be possible to take a project like this one, and generate the needed signal.
    I’d really like to do this; anyone any idea as to what kind of signal they might generate? I guess it’s something on the line that is normally used by those push buttons you use to change volume / skip songs on certain headphones?

    This project seems similar to the Pulse Sensor that was funded through Kickstarter a while back:

    1. So most any (at least that I am aware of) pulse sensor uses some sort of optical detection method (there are also electrical detection method). I looked into the SMS BioSport device and it does this as well. I found this on their website. “Merging premier sound quality with the latest in fitness-monitoring biometrics technology, the headphones include built-in optical sensor that continuously measures your heart rate while dynamically removing noise signals caused by your body’s motion during your workout.”

      I’m not entirely sure what you are specifically referring to here, “…I wonder if it would be possible to take a project like this one [which project, the one featured by Hackaday or the headphones?], and generate the needed signal [is this ‘signal’ referring to the pulse signal in general or the signal generated by the SMS BioSport device?].”

      1. Sorry for being unclear. What I meant was building your own pulse sensor (like the one from this post, or getting the ready to use arduino pulse sensor from the kickstarter link) and using it to create the signal used by apps like Runkeeper as a cheap alternative to the 150+ USD SMS biofit headphones.
        Somehow these SMS biofit headphones manage to get extra power from the headphone jack so they can run without batteries (also means they don’t work with all phones, but it is supported by the nexus 5 I have so I don’t mind ;) )

    1. For sure, heart monitoring is pretty standard these days. This project was done as a part of an introduction to engineering module for freshman biomedical engineering majors. It was designed to show them how simple it is to sense something like heart rate and give them the confidence to do something like that themselves. In this same lab activity, they were asked to research other devices for measuring heart rate, and compare what they did in lab, to whatever commercial product or app they could find. It was a fun class.

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