Vital sign monitors are usually found in developed countries; they just cost too much for less affluent communities to afford. The HealthyPi project aims to change that by developing an inexpensive but accurate monitor using a Raspberry Pi, a custom hat studded with sensors, and a touch screen. The resulting monitor could be used by medical professionals as well as students and private researchers.

[Ashwin K Whitchurch] and his team created HealthyPi, a Raspberry Pi hat that includes an AFE4490 chip serving as the pulse oximeter front end, an analog to digital converter that interprets the ECG and respiration data, and a MAX30205 body temperature sensor. The hat has its own microcontroller, a ATSAMD21 Cortex M0+ that can also be loaded with the Arduino Zero bootloader.

This project is capable of monitoring a patient’s pulse, respiration, body temperature, and all the other vital signs made measure d by other ‘medical-grade’ vital sign monitors at a fraction of the cost. It’s a democratizing technology, and [Ashwin] already has some working hardware available on Crowd Supply.

Learn more about HealthyPi at the project page or download the code from GitHub.