[Cyborg] Building a home polysomnograph to record heart rate, blood oxygen while you sleep.

Kevin Burton burtonator at gmail.com
Thu Jun 2 00:31:43 UTC 2011


Hey gang.

Long story short.  I'm a data/fitness/compsci geek.

I've been aggressively tracking all of my body telemetry as part of my long
term project to improve my health (and live at peak physical condition).

Here are a few links:

http://feedblog.org/2011/04/19/on-polysomnographs-apnea-oximeters-ant-and-data-recorders/
http://feedblog.org/2011/04/17/reflecting-on-my-recent-sleep-experiments/
http://feedblog.org/2011/03/29/the-horrible-problem-of-synchronized-fitness-data/
http://feedblog.org/2011/03/19/my-quantified-self/

I'd like to now build a cheap home polysomnograph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysomnography

I did a bunch of research and a professional ONE NIGHT visit to a sleep
clinic to get a polysomnograph is $2500.

So what I want to do is basically buy a cheap oximeter to measure blood
oxygen and heart rate.

A recent paper was released showing that oximetry is the leading indicator
of apnea and that this $2500 polysomnograph is just a waste of money (I can
find the link if someone wants it but I have to track it down).

But these oximeters are cheap... $24.

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?client=safari&rls=en&q=oximeter&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=312759277086602921&sa=X&ei=I9nmTZ3zEoT0swPxpOSKCw&ved=0CJIBEPMCMAE#ps-sellers

The problem is that none of them have PC integration support.  There is a
chinese company that has one for USB but Windows only drivers and it's $150.

These are designed to be spot monitors.

I think the reason is that the market for more professional ones is like
$500-1000 for "professional" home monitoring.

What I'd like to do is buy one of these cheap ones and mod the hardware to
interface with USB and then publish the specs on how to mod them.

I'm not a hardware hacker though... nor do I have any real motivation to
work on hardware.  This is a one time project.

Any pointers?  I can do the software and analytics component of this and
will volunteer myself as a guinea pig.  I just need a USB interface for the
oximeter data..

Kevin
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