Smart health-care monitoring system — Optical heart rate monitor

Heart Rate is one of the fundamental parameters to judge the fitness of a human body. Over history, many techniques have been used like a stethoscope and some very crude ones like manually tapping the wrist. The aim of this paper is to propose an Optical Heart rate monitor and its implementation in smart health monitoring systems. A technique named Photoplethysmogram is explored. The advantage of this technique lies in its simplicity, low cost, small form factor and ease of implementation in a smart system. Although the design is simple it poses a challenge of perfect amplification and filtering out noise in order to get a smooth and accurate waveform. The paper discusses Analog Front-end design and noise reduction. Once clean data is obtained, its integration with multiple platforms like PC, smartphone is investigated thus pushing towards a smart health-care system.