If biometrics are your thing, the first click of this week will make your heart skip a beat.
Heart rate click carries MAX30100, a pulse oximetry and heart rate sensor optimized for reading the pulse and oximetry data off the tip of your finger. It’s an optical sensor that shines two LEDs through your skin – one red, one infrared – and catches the reflection with a photodetector. The quality of the light that comes back is changed by the absorbance of pulsing blood, and that’s how the internal low-noise analog signal processing unit can be used to infer your pulse or blood oximetry.
Communication with the target board MCU is done through the mikroBUS™ I2C interface.
This is the first of multiple heart rate sensors we have in store for future releases. Each one is optimized for a slightly different usage scenario. Our engineers advise the following when working with this one:
- Even though the sensor incorporates ambient light cancellation and motion artefact resilience, it can still be negatively impacted by excess motion.
- Pay attention to apply the right amount of pressure with your finger. Too much pressure can constrict capillary blood flow and therefore impair the readings.
Be sure to check out the Libstock example, which now comes with help files (in fact the examples are totally different compared to how they used to be, something we will soon address in more detail). In this case, it’s a starter example that lets you transfer the readings over I2C.
Your task is to develop the algorithms to extract the pulse or oximetry data. If you put your heart into it, you can accomplish anything, right?
Depending on the demand, though, we might continue developing our example, too.
More details on the product page.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika