ECE 324

University of Massachusetts at Amherst Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Electronics II

Spring 2012

Design Project Heart Rate Monitor

Goal: Design the electronics necessary to monitor heart rate. The heart rate will be determined by processing the electrical output from a microphone connected to part of a stethoscope. Your measurement must be updated every 15 seconds and must display the number of beats per minute on a two digit LED display. This value should be displayed for 15 seconds until the next measurement update is available. The monitor must be capable of measuring heart rates from 30 to 99 beats per minute. A speaker will beep at each heart beat. Overview A block diagram of the monitor is shown in Figure 1. The stethoscope is placed against the chest near the heart. The sound it picks up is transmitted up a plastic tube to a miniature microphone pick up. The resulting signal is then amplified, filtered, and transformed into a clean TTL pulse train. Counting electronics converts the pulse train into a digital word which represents the number of heart beats per minute. The last stage converts the word to a decimal number and drives the display. The Microphone/Stethoscope Assembly: Everyone has had a doctor listen to their heart using a stethoscope. The stethoscope conducts sound from the patient's chest through a tube up to the doctor's hears. In this project, a small electronic condenser microphone replaces the doctors ears and converts the sound in the tube to an electrical signal. This microphone is the type often used in telephone answering machines and has inside a small IC preamplifier which must be biased by an external source. Seven Segment LED Display: Each digit in the MAN74 display consists of seven light emitting diodes, one for each segment of the digit. To light a segment you forward bias the proper diode. To form each one of the numerals; 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 you must light the proper collection of segments. The BCD-to-7 Segment Decoder Driver IC will do the necessary coding for you.

Design Discussion A suggested design procedure is as follows. 1) Divide the project into parts. If, for example, three engineers are involved, the project could be divided into three subsystems with each engineer responsible for one subsystem. One subsystem might be the microphone amplifier/filter/waveshaper. Another subsystem could be the counting electronics. A third could be the tone generator electronics. Before starting, you must decide on the specifications necessary for each part. It is likely that these specifications will change during the course of the design project and so frequent communication will be necessary. As with most other projects, each team member must fully understanding the overall concept or the end result will not be as good, as cheap, or as quickly achieved. 2) You should review the spec. sheet for the microphone in this assembly and determine how it should be biased. You will see that the manufacturer suggests a resistance (RL) of 2.2 Kohm connected to a voltage between 2.5 and 10 volts. There are two wires connected , one to connect to RL and one to connect to ground. You must be careful not to get them switched. After you have connected the bias, use an oscilloscope set on a slow sweep speed to monitor the output voltage. If you blow or tap on the end of the stethoscope, you should see a response on the oscilloscope. If you place the stethoscope on your chest near your heart and turn up the sensitivity of the oscilloscope, you should just be able to see pulses that correspond to your heart beating. This is the signal that must be amplified, filtered, and converted to a digital pulse train for the counting electronics. This can be tricky because the signal is quite weak and may contain unwanted noise which may need to be filtered out. Usually each heart beat will consist of a two pulses (lub-DUB) and you will need to insure that only one beat is counted. 3) The counting electronics is another complicated part of the problem. You must count the number of beats in some interval under 15 seconds and use this to determine the number of beats that would take place one minute. Counters plus a precise timer or oscillator may be useful for this section. 4) The tone generator would consist of an oscillator to generate the tone, a pulse generator to constrain the length of the beep, and circuitry to drive the speaker. 5) All members of the team should cooperate to minimize the overall part count. For example, possibly a clock signal used in the timing circuitry could also be used to generate the beep.

6) Your final report should have; brief discussions of the design of each subsystem, a neat drawing of the overall design, a parts list and itemized cost, and verification data showing that the design does indeed meet the specifications. Specialized Parts 1 Stethoscope/microphone assembly (Stethoscope made by Lumiscope Co. Edison N.J.; Electret condenser Microphone Cartridge #WM54B) Estimated cost: Materials $10.00 Assembly $20.00 Total $30.00