Body area networks have become common in medical, military and other uses. An example of a body area network is a wearable watch-like heart rate monitor. Measurements of heart rate reveal important information concerning the muscles and the lungs. The pounding of the heart pumps oxygenated blood to the body supplying the muscles with the required oxygen and removing waste products from them. The more the physical activity of the body, the harder the working of the heart. Therefore, the heart rate determines the effectiveness of the exercise routine in improving the overall health of the body.
The use of heart rate monitors is no longer the practice of elite athletes only. Heart rate monitors has become an integral part of each and every work out from the personal trainer to the casual athlete.
A heart rate monitor can be defined as a device that records heart beats and provide a beat per minute analysis to check the condition of the heart. An optical heart beat monitor is the most effective and easy to use the device.
Miniaturized biomedical sensors have received a broad use in the micro-system technology applicable in the medical fields particularly in the microelectronics and micro-machining. Through microelectronics, planar micro-sensors that are low cost with advanced performance can be produced in large numbers. Other than the cost, these micro-sensors are highly reproducible characterized with built-in smartness.
The most commonly used materials in the wide variety of sensors and transducers are the thin-film inter-digital arrays of the micro-electrodes. This paper concerns the design of optical heart rate monitors as part of a biomedical monitoring and analysis of human cognitive processes. The optical heart rate monitor measures the human skin conductivity, skin temperature, reflectance and heart rate using a monitoring system developed with the IDA micro-electrodes. The optical spectrometer for instance measures the electro physiological aspects of the human physiology in a safe manner without affecting the natural physiological process.
The main purpose of the device is to monitor and record the psycho-galvanic effects of the human skin that can be analyzed to reveal the psychical stress effects conducted in various medical and psychological experiments.
In order to capture the psychological changes in the mobile humans, the portable monitoring system comes into play. It is designed and developed according to the standard laboratory-like bridge based measurement system to attain the desired accuracy and sensitivity. Our proposed mobile monitoring system uses microprocessors integrated with RF wireless communication modules to aid in the data transfer between the measuring system and personal computers used for analysis. A graphical interface developed in the C++ programming language provided useful insights for the storage, post-processing, display and interpretation of the heart and skin impedance
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