Blog 5 - "A Bigger Heart"

 A Bigger Heart

Introduction

This week we talked and planned with Jason about what project we’re going to do that puts the skills we’ve learned so far this semester to good use. We all agreed to continue working on HRV monitoring with two-week sprints. During our discussion, we talked about a bunch of different areas where we can apply what we’ve learned—like Analog In, Analog Out, HRV, FFT on the micro:bit, ethics, and maybe even setting up a spreadsheet to track FFT and BPM data.

HRV

HRV stands for Heart Rate Variability. It’s the variation in time between your heartbeats, measured in milliseconds. HRV is important because it can help us understand how healthy someone is just by looking at their heart rate. It can show if a person has a good nervous system balance or if they’re resilient. It can also point to stress, fatigue, or other health issues. We’ve already done some work on heart monitoring—check out Blog 2 for that.

Analog In & Out

We can use the microbit and heart rate sensers we used in Week 2 for getting a Analog in. The senser will let us read in voltage levels which are then collected by and processed by the microbit. This is very important for tracking HRV data accurately. On the other hand, analog out allows us to sends the data to an app or spreadsheet and have it display a graph with time/frequency. I have covered this in blog 4.

FFT

FFT stands for Fast Fourier Transform, which is a way to break down a signal into different frequency components. We can use FFT to take raw data from a heart rate senser like the one we have for the microbit and see pattern's we wouldn't be able to get from looking at a time-based signal. On a microbit we can analyse things like changes in BPM over time to detect if there is any noise which will improve our accuracy
High Frequency: This is linked to the parasympathetic nervous system, this is were you'll see if a person is relaxed or calm. 
Low Frequency: this is linked to the sympathetic (stress) and parasympathetic (relaxation) systems. Higher LF can show mental effort or stress
Very Low Frequency: This is related to Body temps or long-term stress and fatigue.

Spreadsheet

We are thinking of setting up a spreadsheet to help visualize our HRV data. This would be done by logging our FFT results and BPM results. A spreadsheet will make it a lot easier to see the progress over each sprint and compare results and being able to turn raw data into charts and graphs, like a line graph for BPM changes.

Ethics

With dealing with sensitive data like heart data there comes a lot of ethical concerns. For example if we are working with other peoples data we will want to make sure it is stored safely. For this iteration we are not trying to diagnose anyone, so we have to be careful about how we express our opinions on the data collected and respect peoples personal data.

Conclusion

Overall I'm feeling really optimistic and good about the direction we are taking with this iteration, it will bring together a lot of what we've learned and worked on so far like HRV, Analog in and out, and also new features like FFT, Spreadsheet's and even talking about ethics. Its exciting to take something like heart rate data and actually turn it into something useful.

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