2018 3rd International Conference for Convergence in Technology (I2CT)

The Gateway Hotel, XION Complex, Wakad Road, Pune, India. Apr 06-08, 2018

Wireless Heart Rate Monitoring and Vigilant System

Abhiyash Hodge, Hrishikesh Humnabadkar, Akshay Bidwai
Electronics and Telecommunication Department
Vishwakarma Institute of Technology PUNE, INDIA
abhiyash.hodge15@vit.edu, hrishikesh.humnabadkar15@vit.edu, akshay.bidwai15@vit.edu

Abstract—The human health quality is degrading in last few one is nearby to give him emergency help? So, to avoid such a
year, many heart-related diseases are often observed in hazardous situation there is a need for heart rate monitoring and
people may lead to heart attack. The heart attacks can be alert system.
prevented if we can constantly monitor the heart rate of the
patient and immediately give alert to the doctors. The It is very important as far as patient is considered in
heartbeat detection is usually done in a traditional way, such a dangerous situation. To avoid any mischief with patients
butin this project the task is accomplished with evolved there should be some alert system present and the interesting
technology to check the heart rate of the person and transfer point here is to transfer information wirelessly to the desired
it wirelessly to the concerned person in order to take a quick position. There are basically two tasks one is to detect the
action. The main objective of the work is to provide quick abnormality and other to transfer it to doctor wirelessly.
assistance and cure to heart patients and to have advanced
technology in the health sector and to bring revolutionary It is not a tedious job but efficiency and cost of the
advancement in the health sector. This project aims to bring system differ from system to system. There are many systems
a system which is less expensive and efficient in heart rate like TE echocardiogram, Isotope stress test, Angiogram, Holter
monitoring. If a heart rate obtained from heartbeat sensor monitor and much more but many of the systems are not much
exceeds the set limit then the system will send a signal to the known to the community. There is serious lack of awareness
microcontroller, the controller will send a message through about many present systems and the major drawback of many
wireless transfer module which is received at receiver systems is highly qualified professionals required for operation.
module and controller again decodes the message to give Many systems are much costlier that small hospitals can’t afford
alert to doctors. The system monitors continuously, such systems or can’t be owned by individuals.
irrespective of the time and one can also get the live updates
regarding patient’s heart rate condition and can be The key components of our work is detecting abnormal
displayed on screen. values of heartbeat sensor and sending a message through NRF
module to receiver module and alert the doctor.
Index Terms— heart attack, heart rate monitoring,
revolutionary advancement, heartbeat sensor, microcontroller II. BACKGROUND STUDY AND RELATED WORK

I. INTRODUCTION
The heart rate monitor is a system which allows to measure the
THE main cause of over 15 million death worldwide is heart- heart rate of a person in real time and record it for further study.
related diseases. Cardiovascular diseases can be observed by The innovations in science and technology led to an unexpected
irregularities in heart rate of a patient. The project provides the revolution for the various problems faced by human beings. The
basic model of heart rate monitoring and alert system. The main first wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) heart rate monitor was
focus of work is that patients should get immediate treatment as invented in 1977 as a training aid for the Finish National Cross
and when required and also doctors should have real-time Country Ski team [1]. Actually, retail sales of theheart rate
information about patients. We want more efficient and less monitor have been started from 1983[1].
expensive system with the use of evolving technology to meet
the required objective. The heartbeat rate is detected using
photoplethysmograph (PPG) technique in the work “Heartbeat
The problem we identified was what will happen if monitoring alert via SMS” [2]. The system uses microcontroller
patients have any abnormality regarding heart condition and no PIC16F87tomeasure the heart rate per minute. During the

978-1-5386-4273-3/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 1

hazardous condition, it sends the SMS alert to doctors or
concerned person via SMS.
PPG is a simple optical technique to detect blood volume change
in microvascular bed of tissue. This technique is many times
used to make a measurement of the skin surface. An MPLAB
software is used in designing the PPG technique adopted
heartbeat sensor circuit.

To make a monitoring system flexible and cost-

effective researcher conceived the work “A Low-Cost Optical
Sensor Based Heart Rate Monitoring System” [3]. This system
uses change in amount of reflected light which a photo transistor
sensor will detect. After removal of noise the analog signal is
converted to digital by data processing in single microcontroller
chip. This device is developed to respond to medical
emergencies via Bluetooth and cellular communication.

The system titled as “Microcontroller Based Heart Beat

Monitoring and Alert System” [4] shows how a single-chip
microcontroller can analyze heart beat rate and it is transferred
to doctors using GSM every twenty-four hours. In the work
“Heartbeat Sensing and Heart Attack Detection using the
Internet of Things” [5] the abnormality of the patient is detected
and sent to the microcontroller to send the information on the Fig.1.Flowchart of system
internet from where it gives access to any person through the
particular app for detecting real-time information of a patient.
The research and work in “HEARTBEAT MONITORING AND B: System Description:
ALERT SYSTEM USING GSM TECHNOLOGY” [1] gives the
alert by SMS and also horns the alarm at the medical The basic components of our system are Arduino Uno
emergencies to help in patient’s diagnosis and early and board, NRF module, Heartbeat sensor, alarm or buzzer (for an
preventive cure or treatment. alert), memory unit.

III. MAIN BODY OF THE PAPER

The Arduino Uno board

A:Technique: The Arduino Uno is 14 digital input/output pins, 6 analog

The system which is been proposed has the ability to detect input pins microcontroller board based on the AT mega
heart rate and any abnormalities regarding the blood pressure 328(datasheet). Out of the 14 digital pins, 6 pins can be used as
which causes a heart attack in many cases. The basic concept PWM pins. It has 16 MHZ ceramic resonator, a USB
here is detection of heartbeat by pulse or heartbeat sensor and connection, an ICSP header, a power jack, I2C, reset button. It is
transferring it wirelessly using NRF module which is evolved well-integrated board with whatever is needed to support
technology in a wireless transfer of data through the air. Also the microcontroller. It is open-source physical computing platform
communication for high range can be done with the help of which is based on the simple microcontroller board, and a
GSM module. There are various trans-receiver pair available in development environment for wiring software for the board.
order to make communication up to the desired range. The
project is a small model of a heart attack detecting system using
wireless communication.

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 pins. The NRF to Arduino connections should be like VCC-
3.3V, GND-GND, CS-7, CE-8, MOSI-11, MISO-12, and SCK-
13.

Heart Beat Sensor

It provides a simpler way to study the heart function. This
sensor monitors blood flow through fingers and is made to give
a digital output of the heartbeat when a finger is placed on it.
During the working of a sensor, the beat Led flashes with each
heartbeat. This digital output can be directly connected to the
microcontrollers to measure the heart rate or Beats per Minute
(BPM) rate.

Fig 2. Block Diagram of Arduino Board. .

NRF module
It is basically transceiver module (NRF24L001). The
communication between two modules happens at 2.4 GHz. It is
basically made up of a PCB module and external antenna
models while the range of PCB modules goes up to 250 m to
1000 m in range external antenna model. There can be Bi-
directional communication possible.
Fig. 5.Pulse sensor/Herat beat sensor.

The basic principle of working of this pulse sensor is of

light modulation by blood flow through finger at each pulse [7].
The pulse sensor is plug and play type heart rate sensor for
Arduino. The output graph of the sensor can be also obtained on
serial monitor of Arduino software.

The main work in system is of designing the circuit

consists of the all the above-mentioned components. Fig.6
Fig 3. Pin configuration of NRF module. shows the circuit for the implementation of a project. There are
two Arduino boards in which one signifies transmitter circuit
and another receiver circuit.

Fig. 4.NRF Module

The module communicates using SPI protocol. Hence, we

should make looking at the Arduino pin connector model SPI Fig.6.Circuit diagram of system

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 C: The most important thing about the system is that it is
highly efficient for the patients who are admitted to the hospitals
to signify doctors constantly about patient’s heart condition. The
major limitation of the system was a range, as we have seen that
efficient working of NRF module can be possible up to 1000 m
only. If we want to increase the range one may try for repeaters
module in between to elongate the communication.

IV. PERFORMANCE AND EXPERIMENTS

We have programmed the system in such a way that sensor will
sense the heartbeat and system will monitor the heartbeat rate Fig.9.Graph
when a finger is kept on the sensor. As shown in fig.7 the
Arduino board is connected with heartbeat sensor, NRF module Table1:
and it is powered with laptop and output is observed on serial Sr. no Avg. Age Average max. Target HR
monitor. Since there is serial communication so we connect (in yrs.) heartrate Zone(BPM)
Arduino with USB port. The program is uploaded in Arduino. 1 20 200 120-180
The graphs obtained in serial plotter are as shown in following 2 30 190 114-171
figures. 3 40 180 108-162
4 50 170 102-153
5 60 160 96-144
6 70 150 90-135

This graph and table illustrates that the graph of sensor may
vary from person to person and heart rate also varies with
respect to age of the person. As it is experimented with different
age group of people we obtained different values of heart rate
for different people and also threshold limit is also different for
different age group.

VI. CONCLUSION
Generally, we can easily detect heart beat with much high-level
devices but we can say this paper presents a cost effective and
efficient working system for heart rate monitoring and alert
Fig.7.system performance and experiment. (vigilant) system. Theproposed system helps to identify real time
heart condition of many patients at a time to doctor’s cabin.The
V. RESULTS much greater scope is available with this system; we can
increase the range by using long range RF modules. This project
has great foresight as it is further modernized to achieve many
useful results. This system not only helps patients but also large-
scale improvement in it can have an enhancing help for many
hospital’s health care systems.
Further improvement in such projects can lead to health care
product development for fire-extinguishers, miners, sportsman
etc. We can also transfer entire real time ECG or EEG in future
days to any high qualified doctors immediately no need to wait
for external doctor to come to the patient, he can suggest
treatment immediately, also the proposed system can be used
format monitoring many patients simultaneously using many to
Fig.8.Graph one communication.

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 REFERENCES
[1] S.UUfoaroh, C.O.Oranugo, M.E.Uchechukwu “Heartbeat monitoring and
alert system using GSM technology,” IJERGS. vol.3, issue 4, July-August
2015.
[2] Warsuzarina, Mat Jubadi “Heartbeat Monitoring Alert via SMS”. Dept. of
Electronics Engineering University Tun
HusseinOnnMalaysiaBatuPahatJohor, Malaysia; MohdSahak S.F.A.
[3] Mohammad N. Khan, et.al. “A Low Cost Optical Sensor Based Heart Rate
Monitoring System”, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
[4] Microcontroller Based Heart Beat Monitoring and Alerting System
byMayank Kothari Assistant Professor NMIMS, MPSTMEShirpur, India
[5] A.sidheeque, et.al. “Heartbeat Sensing and Heart Attack Detection using
Internet of Things”.IJESC.Vol 7. Issue 4 Department of ECE ,Achariya
college of engineering technology, Puducherry, India