Microcontroller Design and Bluetooth Signal Transmission for the Non-Invasive Health Monitoring System (NIHMS)

Abstract

<p>The NIHMS is intended to be a multipurpose health monitoring device with current transducers for measuring photoplethysmography (PPG), electro-oculography (EOG), and temperature. All three of these transducers can provide useful data for diagnosis or experiments and EOG can provide an effective method for HCI. Through the use of Bluetooth technology the device can be paired with a wide variety of pre-existing devices (cell phones, PDAs and computers to name a few). This makes the device portable, cheaper and versatile. Data is collected from the transducers by a microcontroller with an attached Bluetooth module, which transmits the data to a host computer for processing. Costs are reduced by making use of pre-existing processing power and display on the host computer. Depending on the application the data can be processed in any way required on the host computer. For the purpose of this project the host computer application acts as a TCP/IP server to make the data available to clients over the internet. The data obtained, though noisy, is sufficient for measuring heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and EOG. Details on the hardware and software design for the microcontroller and Bluetooth data transmission for the NIHMS are presented in this report.</p>