Note: The project is not fully completed and ready... Updates will be shared as it is complete.
Many Alzheimer patients suffer sudden shaking movements with increased heart rate. This may lead to heart stroke and further damage to the patient.To solve this problem I wanted to make a device that can detect the instant little vibrating motions and the heart rate of a person. And for the instant processing, I needed a fast MCU that can also connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth.
Parts:
For detecting vibrations I planned to use ADXL345 accelerometer as it operates on i2c and I had one. But I had sent problems in taking reading to my MCU i.e., Pocket Beagle. Also, it was slow so detecting small vibrations was difficult. So I decided to use ADXL335 an analogue accelerometer which was easy to use.
For the heart rate sensor, I used MAX30100.And the MCU was Pocket Beagle - An RPi zero W alternative by BeagleBone. It has a faster processor more RAM and more features but lacks WiFi and Bluetooth. Above all that RPi community is far better than beagle bone. The documentation available for RPi and the OEM support is also better. Even though there were these problems I wanted to try Pocket beagle (due to all of its hype) .
Working:
This concept works in a simple way. When there are shaky movements detected by the accelerometer, then it starts taking a reading and compares them to the given set of data. If the amplitude is too high then, it may be the normal movement of the person. But if there are very small jerky movements then it will detect them and measure the heart rate of the person, that data will conclude about the condition of the person. If it not good then there will be an alarm sent on the smartphone which will ring loudly and may also call Emergency services. This can prevent any heart injury or more brain damage.
Methodology:
I started it off by downloading the image from beagle bone website and then inserting the flashed sd card into Pocket Beagle. The first thing after the getting started was that I opened node red my favourite GUI editor. It was nothing special and also had some functionalities compromised. The best part was the cloud9 IDE. I could program in ay language I want to achieve the same result. And due to this advantage, I could try out (never tried) languages like Ruby and JS to do embedded programming.
The transfer to the smartphone I used a simple Bluetooth module - HC05
After having the concept, I ordered the parts i.e., ADXL335 and MAX30100 on eBay. and sadly, they have not arrived till date. Hence, the project is not complete. But the software is ready to go.
But here is a short video on the concept of how the project will work... It is quite explanatory.
Video about the concept of its working:
The code will be kept here once it is completely ready: https://github.com/vimarsh244/Helping-Alzeihmer-Patients
The project is not complete presently, but it surely will be later. Stay Tuned for that.