Vitals Alarm

While a device like a room temperature alarm would indeed be useful to me, such a device is already commercially available. Thus, such a project wouldn’t be particularly enriching nor challenging. Everything I set out to do would be much easier to automate system-side with cron jobs. I could set them up to check both CPU and GPU die temps at a given time and report them. If they’re higher than expected, then chances are either the room is too warm, or there’s an accumulation of dust, or maybe something else…

With that in mind, something much better would be a vitals alarm of sorts. It would measure body temperature, heart rate, skin conductivity, amount of sleep, and timeframe slept within.

The minimum target is a discrete device with certain peripherals for measuring the given vitals. There will be a screen as part of the output, as well as a piezoelectric buzzer. The device may also communicate with the network to see the outputs of the aforementioned cron jobs to also influence the output. For instance, if the computers are running cool even under load, but some vital is off on your end, then the device will buzz and say “Your computers are running great… how about you pay attention to yourself, eh?”

Now with that said, while a discrete device that occupies some space that I occupy is nice and all, a wearable would be even better in many cases. It includes all of the same inputs, but condensed into a wearable package. This, however, could be difficult to package in a somewhat sleek manner given the devices available to us. This will be a reach goal.

Regardless of what form this takes, the general flow of information can be shown in this chart:

Here are the materials I will need regardless of the form this project takes:

Some microcontroller (Arduino, Particle Photon, etc., I have a few UNO R3s)

Temperature sensor (have?)

Heart rate monitor (will order)

Skin conductivity measuring tool (currently in development, need to determine suitable op-amp…)

20×4 LCD display (have)

Piezoelectric buzzer (have both active and passive)

Numeric keypad (have)

The maquette ended up being very barebones and completely nonfunctional, but here it is anyway. Right now, it’s missing the LCD Display, and some components are standing in for others while I wait for the actual components to arrive. This is the bare minimum device’s footprint (roughly).

The LCD is missing. Pretend it’s there for now…

Final Materials list (that needs to be ordered):

Grove GSR sensor

Pulse Oximeter

Heart rate monitor (fallback in case PulseOx does not work)

…and first test of newly-acquired Grove GSR sensor…

My own Galvanic Skin Response fluctuating as I observe the progression of #Indecision2020. At the time, I didn’t quite have the data range set properly. This has since been fixed.