Heart Rate Monitoring and Alert System Using Smartphone

Heart disease like arrhythmia need continual long-term monitoring. For example, in emergency at home, where the patient is unable help themselves or seek help, there is a need for long distance health monitoring for early and faster assessment for treatment. This project presents a remote monitoring system for monitoring the irregularity in heart rate, which enables real-time monitoring for the cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) patient. The system utilizes Photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor to obtain the pulse reading. The sensor is non-invasive where pulse reading is taken from the finger. The microcontroller is used to receive and process the signal. When irregularity in heart rate is detected, the microcontroller will send data to a smartphone using Bluetooth. A mobile application is developed to receive the data and to send out an alert in the form of a text message to another mobile phone. The alert is successfully sent to the specified recipient such as medical doctors or next of kin in the emergency which contain the details such as heart rate information and GPS coordinate. Evaluation on the functionality of the device shows that the developed device can reach accuracy of 97.50%, precision of 96.55%, sensitivity of 99.29% and specificity of 91.67%.