DIY ECG electronics project
Scott at The Blogging Protagonist has posted an incredibly cool electronics project to make a ECG monitor. This is so perfectly in the spirit of Hack Ability, though it doesn’t address an accessibility or assistive tech issue directly, it is all about building a cool thing to give information about your own body.
The goal of this project is to generate an extremely cheap, functional ECG machine made from common parts, most of which can be found around your house. This do-it-yourself (DIY) ECG project is different than many others on the internet in that it greatly simplifies the circuitry by eliminating noise reduction components, accomplishing this via software-based data post-processing. Additionally, this writeup is intended for those without any computer, electrical, or biomedical experience, and should be far less convoluted than the suspiciously-cryptic write-ups currently available online. In short, I want to give everybody the power to visualize and analyze their own heartbeat!
Check out Scott’s heart rate monitor as he plays Counterstrike:
Neat!
(via MedGadget)
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Ditto on the earlier isolation comment. The same conductive path that allows you to measure signals coming from the heart could just as easily conduct electricity *into* the heart. Less than a milliamp of current injected through the heart can cause cardiac arrest. This is not trivial stuff.
ECGs need to be electrically isolated from the mains and hazards in very specific ways. If you don’t know how to do this, then I strongly urge you to not to experiment with this.