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Very much in the spirit of the 90-90 rule, this took much longer than I assumed.

So my goal is to put the galvinic skin response, hand temperature and SPO2 sensors onto a ring connected to a bluetooth ‘watch’, and have some phone app which can stream the data. To play around with a microcontroller which has bluetooth, I got the STEVAL-IDB008V2 dev board, which has a BlueNRG2 chip. Because I’ve only played with the Nucleos so far, I was overoptimistic about linux compatibility. On the plus side, my setup for development has gotten much more comfortable-I’m back to using emacs and makefiles, and I’ve learned how to use st-util to flash and debug and I’ve also gotten my first experience using logic analyzers with sigrok and pulseview.

The issue which held me up was actually getting the programs onto the chip. While the dev board has a JTAG header, the default application disables those pins so it cannot be programmed in that way. The alternative is to flash it with the UART bootloader, which requires the chip be booted into a specific mode and a different pair of pins.This board has a USB, but unlike the nucleos, it is not connected to a ST-Link. All of the software for flashing the chip was windows-only, and I had a lot of trouble getting that working.

Anyway, after much toil I managed to work out a way to reliably flash the chip using the windows software on a VM, but at this point I had already mostly written a bootloader using a nucleo as an intermediary. A warning on the very slim odds a reader will be stuck on the bootloader like I was. As far as I can tell, the bootloader will respond with a positive acknowledge even to invalid addresses, only to fail when receiving the data to flash. To work the last bugs out of the bootloader I was working on, I compared the output of the logic analyzer for each of them flashing the chip with the same data. This revealed that the address bytes I was using were off allowing me to fix the program.

The MAX30102 arrived and I spent some time. I’ve also gotten metal disks and will try to make rings with polymer clay to hold the electrodes for GSR on better. As such I’m busy and this will be brief.

After reading through the datasheets, I wrote something to set registers for SpO2 measurements (IR and red LEDs active, there’s a heart rate mode with only one), and after having bad luck with guessing appropriate settings, eventually found all the recommended settings in the application notes for the demonstration board.

I had a bit of difficulty getting data from it, if just because it’s smart. There’s a 32 sample FIFO circular buffer for the data, which is accessed by repeated reading a single byte register. The read and write pointers are accessible but unnessesary for this, as they both automatically increment. Samples are 2 24 bit numbers (IR and red channel). As is, the program I’m using to read data sets an interrupt enable flag on the MAX30102 to check it for available data and then checks it repeatedly. There is also an almost full interrupt, and I spent some time getting the MAX30102 to trigger the nucleo, but I’m still having trouble reading multiple samples from the ADC.

See https://github.com/garthwhelan/Nucleo-MAX30102, which I will hopefully have enough time to make nice because I plan to use this with hand tempurature and GSR for biofeedback.

Anyway, in the end I got a reasonable trace for reflectance values.

In which I trudge through some simple tests and realize it helps to read a bit before starting things. Today I tried to make a very very simple photoplethysmogram (light-enlargment-gram). Flesh is relatively transparent to red and infrared light, and that changes with the amounts of blood in one’s tissue. This can be used to measure heart rate. The light absorption of hemoglobin changes depending on whether it is attached to oxygen or not. This can be used to measure heart rate too, as well as oxygen saturation (pulse oximetry).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoplethysmogram (PPG)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_oximetry

A nice combination of sensors for a wearable watch+ring would be PPG, perifereal temperature and galvinic skin response. I spent a couple of hours trying to get a basic PPG with some IR LEDs and photodiodes. Unfortunately I charged ahead without reading anything and now realize that PPGs are done differently from what I had assumed. Basically, I was just trying to measure IR light reflected (diffusely) by tissue over time.

I bought some 940 nm IR LEDs and photodiodes and made a photointerrupter as a test (read: pointed them at each other and looked at voltages as I put my hand between them). I also played with them as a distance sensor by reflecting the IR off of objects. This was neat.

Unfortunately there was no obvious change in reflected IR during a heartbeat when they were pointed into my wrist. I moved them much closer, which caused the diode to always be saturated. I then tried it with a shield around the IR led made of tin foil, securing them together with hot glue. The diode was always saturated in this case as well.

I then tried seperating them with a peice of cardboard. This worked and generated a very small signal fluctuating with my heart beat when it was pressed against flesh. I’m not confident that this was PPG as opposed to just changes in distance and pressure.

For PPG beyond wikipedia:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224765089_Pulse_Oximeter_Waveform_Photoelectric_Plethysmography

Takeways:

• For PPG, only 940nm is displayed (as above).
• Finger tips are the best position (assuming transmission here).
• Strain gauges have been used to measure heart rate.

For pulse oximetry:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405959516301205#br000015

Oximetry is done with a pair of LEDs, a red (660 nm) and an IR one (940nm). Hemoglobin with oxygen absorbs more infrared (NOTE: the paper has an error here “more infrared light (660 nm wavelength) and lesser red light (940 nm wavelength) than Hb.” reverses the frequencies compared to the colors).

The ratio of the varying to constant intensities of each LED color is calculated, and the ratio of the two ratios is compared to an empirical fitting to give the saturated O2 levels. Measuring this accurately by reflection is hard, the paper reads as a failure (“presents challenges”), but heart rate is easier than oxygen saturation.

I carved handles out of wood and mounted the strain sensors in it.

Seems to be a working, if low quality dynamometer. If I was to redo this I would build more around the grip and possible use different strain sensors. I might measure the effects of irraditation (tensing other muscles in this context) on grip strength later.