A Bluetooth oximeter

http://smartmaker.org/wiki/Projects:smARtPULSE

Designed by Dimitri Albino, the smARtPULSE oximeter helps monitor blood oxygen levels, using standard photo-detection technology. A sensor is placed on a thin part of the patient's and light of two different wavelengths is passed through the patient to a photodetector. The changing absorbance at each of the wavelengths is measured, allowing the device to determine the absorbance due to the pulsing arterial blood alone, excluding vein blood, skin, bone, muscle, fat, etc. With near-infrared spectroscopy, it is possible to measure both oxyhaemoglobin and deoxygenated haemoglobin on a peripheral scale. The oximeter can connect to other devices using low-power Bluetooth 4.0, and people can use it out-of-the-box with the free app that runs on iOS and Android.

The open twist: What makes the smARtPULSE special is the complete open source nature of the project and the resulting ability to develop and manufacture the product at low cost, offer the best applications for tracking and analysing the readings, and ease of connecting to any computer running Linux, Windows or OS X. The team is working on a great application programming interface ( API) and there will even be libraries available for Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Electric Imp. The special algorithm, hardware, protocol and API are all open source, so anyone can develop projects and

ideas based on the data received from smARtPULSE. The team believes that it will help engineers connect the oximeter to the Internet of Things ( Kevin Ashton’s 1999- debuted concept of all objects being directly linked to the Internet via bar- codes or RFID, and without humans playing a role)— consider some examples like remote monitoring of health status and a low- cost network of oximeters for hospitals.