Towards a wearable non-invasive low-cost device for measuring physiological indices

With advancement of healthcare techniques, now-a-days, health monitoring systems can help to reduce the mortality rate through timely diagnosis of one's pathological state. The focus of modern treatment techniques is slowly shifting to the prevention of disease by adopting preventive measures and encouraging improved physical fitness, including early warning signs of diseases. Timely diagnosis and availability of devices that can accurately measure one's physiological indices can help an individual to become conscious of his health condition on the one hand and adopt adequate preventive measures to address the pathological condition on the other. However, given the limited availability of proper healthcare resources, particularly in middle and low income countries, access to cheap and user-friendly techniques of health diagnostic tools becomes critical. Motivated by this, in our research we present a novel, non-invasive and cost effective micro-controller based device that can measure blood pressure, pulse rate and saturation of peripheral oxygen level of an individual. We validated our prototype version of the developed device among few participants and the initial preliminary results are promising.