Week One Iteration - Hasan Berk

Big Heart SETU 

19/01/2023

Week One Iteration

Overview

The aim of the project is to try and form a visualization of HRV ( Heart Rate Variability ) using IoT devices and a cloud based application.  Some current ideas are using a heart beat sensor to feed into visual feedback, for example a light or display. The data will also be emitted back to a MQTT app using a MQTT broker. For initial phases we have been brainstorming ideas, which I will talk about later on.

HRV - What is it?

HRV is a measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat.

. In simple terms, it's all the tiny differences in the time between each heartbeat. Imagine your heart as a drummer - it doesn't hit the drum in a perfect, mechanical rhythm. Instead, the time between each beat changes slightly between each beat. 

Why is it important?


A high HRV means that the time between your heartbeats changes a lot, which is usually a sign of good heart health and a strong ability to handle stress. On the other hand, a low HRV, where the time between beats is more uniform, might indicate stress, fatigue, or underlying health issues.

Biological side of things:

This variability is influenced by our autonomic nervous system, which controls bodily functions like heart rate, digestion, and respiratory rate. This system has two parts: the sympathetic (often called the "fight or flight" response) and the parasympathetic (often called "rest and digest"). HRV is a way to understand the balance between these two systems. If your body can switch smoothly between these states, it's a sign of good health and resilience.


Aim of this project:

Although there are many ways to increase your HRV (Whoop, 2020), in this project we aim to use intentional breathing by visually feeding back feedback to the end user. Studies have shown that proper breath control can reduce stress (Zaccaro et al., 2018), improve physical and mental health, and improve HRV (Kim et al., 2018). 

We want to find a way to measure both HRV, and breathing, and show how proper breathing can improve your HRV. This would be the end goal.


What products are out there? Which people used it?

HRV : 

There is a couple of products which measure HRV on the market already. The most prominent ones available at the moment are the Apple Watch and the WHOOP fitness band:

Apple Watch


WHOOP fitness band


These can both measure your HRV and are used by fitness-orientated users to track general health. While these can be good for physical activity, health and wellbeing, it is out of scope for this project, since they are proprietary and cannot be integrated with our custom MTQQ application.

These products are aimed for endurance athletes, as it allows them to monitor positive and negative trends in fitness, fatigue, and readiness to compete. The purpose of our project, 'Big Heart', is to bridge a gap between technology and the human body, rather than a fitness orientated focus. We want to be able to visualize these crucial bodily functions that we ignore everyday as it is not in our conscience.

Breathing - 

The students in SETU developed a breathing steampunk-inspired mask which took in breaths through a microphone and fed that back into a speaker along with a mechanical piston. While this is one option, we could also introduce tactile input, maybe a button on a ring, to measure every inhale and exhale.  

Technologies to measure HRV -> How do they feed back to the user?

While these use your heart beat through your wrist, as well as other sensors to measure and calculate HRV, research suggests that this method is only efficient for monitoring and exercising - see below. 

Research suggests that chest straps that use ECG electrodes are the most accurate way to monitor HRV from home. Most chest straps can be paired with other wearables, but they're meant more for tracking during exercise than for 24/7 wear. - Source: https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/best-hrv-monitor

As well as this, the fitness trackers above feed back the information to the user through their dedicated applications. This again, is not suitable for the scope of this project as it requires proprietary software to visualize this information. 

The most accurate method in measuring HRV would be through the use of a heart rate monitor with the chest straps as mentioned above. We could measure HRV through this, and find a way to bring this to a visual technology, such as an LED display, a stress ball with LEDs, or even an aural feedback like a speaker. Further brainstorming is required on this topic.

LED ball


LED Heart Rate

Tools we can use:


ECG Module:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Youmile-Module-Measurement-Monitoring-Arduino/dp/B08216YR9H/ref=sr_1_3_sspa?keywords=pulse+sensor&qid=1705936539&sr=8-3-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9hdGY&psc=1

References

Kim, H.-G. et al. (2018) ‘Stress and heart rate variability: A meta-analysis and review of the literature’, Psychiatry Investigation, 15(3), pp. 235–245. doi:10.30773/pi.2017.08.17.

Whoop (2020) 10 ways to increase heart rate variability (HRV), WHOOP. Available at: https://www.whoop.com/us/en/thelocker/increase-hrv-heart-rate-variability/.

Zaccaro, A. et al. (2018) ‘How breath-control can change your life: A systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 12. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00353.





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