Microcontroller Based Heart Rate Monitor

Mohamed Fezari, Mounir Bousbia-Salah, and Mouldi Bedda
Department of electronics, University of Badji Mokhtar, Annaba

Abstract: This paper describes the development of a heart rate monitor system based on a microcontroller. It offers the advantage of portability over tape-based recording systems. The paper explains how a single-chip microcontroller can be used to analyse heart beat rate signals in real-time. In addition, it allows doctors to get the heart beat rate file of the patient by e-mail every twenty four hours. It can also be used to control patients or athletic person over a long period. The system reads, stores and analyses the heart beat rate signals repetitively in real-time. The hardware and software design are oriented towards a single-chip microcontroller-based system, hence minimizing the size. The important feature of this paper is the use of zero crossing algorithm to compute heart rate. It then processes on real-time the information to determine some heart diseases.

Keywords: Microsystems, microcontroller, real-time, heart rate monitoring, zero crossing algorithm.

 Received November 30, 2006; accepted June 12, 2007