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

[John E]

Kevin,

+1 Its a good idea, and can be made surprisingly cheap.

The trick for Spo2 measurement is buy the sensors, and make the
measuring electronics yourself. TI offers Hardware Development kits
for medical applications that might help.

Regards,
John

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Eric Boyd <mrericboyd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hey, great idea, it'd be super awesome to have a USB-capable pulse-oximetry
> device.  I haven't heard of such a thing, at any price, though you're
> probably right that expensive ones exist.  I once hacked a cheap ($30)
> finger-clamp one in order to get out the heart-beat information, but
> basically all I did was wire into the LED display - it had a little display
> with 5 LEDs serving as a kind of bar-graph display for the signal from the
> heart, so all I did was wire into the 3rd and 4th LED, and feed that into
> the digital pins on my microcontroller.  Easy hack.  But I imagine it
> wouldn't be that much harder to find e.g. the control circuitry for the
> display and reverse it to get out the characters that are being shown (and
> thus the oxi-reading).  Feed that into a new Uno arduino and you could write
> the USB-interfacing stuff.  I'd love to help but sadly I'm in Toronto now.
> Hopefully someone will step forward to help you out!
>
> Eric
>
>
> On 6/1/11 8:31 PM, Kevin Burton wrote:
>
> 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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