Hi,
I am working on a school project in which I want to build an Arduino based optical sensor system for measuring various time varying effects (heart rate, respiratory rate, muscle oxygenation/deoxygenation, signs of hydration/dehydration etc) on myself, and of course for experimenting.
Being quite new to the whole Arduino scene, I need some input on what kind of hardware to use. Preferably LEDs and photodetectors in the range of 540 nm - 1800 nm (if possible) compatible with Arduino and what kind of micro controllers and setup to use.
best regards,
Martin
There seems to be a huge amount of information on heart rate sensor with arduino. Why not start with just the heart rate and get a sensor or two? They are not expensive. Make sure the sensor comes with some code. If you need some help deciding, just post links to the sensors you are deciding.
While you are setting up a heart rate sensor, a nice feature of arduino is that it has plenty of a/d inputs for you to try stuff out. I recently got a packet of several LED for less than $4 and a packet of light sensitive photodiodes for less than $4.
There are numerous non-medical projects which I got mine for.
It won't cost you much to get similar. I'm not sure what colour you'd need so try and find somebodies published example. I think that the commercial one might use two visible colours. If it needs 1800nm, those are specialised expensive materials; not suited to school projects. While parts exist at 1400 to 1600 nm, those ones will always be InGaAsP packaged for telecomms use, so always more expensive than visible to near ir LED, and much more expensive than silicon visible-to-900nm photodiode detectors. As a rule of thumb with red and visible, you must be able to see it clearly in a dark room before it is a nice strong signal so that you might detect it in a hobby project.