Biohacking projects are not new to Hackaday and it’s certainly a genre that really piques our interest. Our newest biohacking device comes courtesy of [Manivannan] who brings his flavor of a wearable biosensor with some safety and security elements built-in through AWS.
The hardware is composed of some outstanding components we have seen. He has an AD8232 electrocardiogram front end, the MAX30102 integrated pulse oximeter IC for identifying blood oxygen and heart rate, and the ever-popular LM35 for measuring body temperature. Either of these chips would be ideal for your next diy biosensor project though you might try the MAX30205 body temperature sensor given its 0.1-degree Celsius accuracy. However, what really piqued our interest was the use of Microchip’s AVR-IoT WA development Board. now we’ve talked about this board before and also discussed you could probably do all the same things with an ESP-device, but possibly now we get to see the board a bit much more in action.
[Manivannan] walks the reader through the board’s setup and everything looks to be pretty straightforward. He ultimately rigged together a very primitive dashboard for seeing all his vitals in real-time, demonstrating how you could put together your own client dashboard for remote monitoring of vitals or other sensor signals. He emphasizes that all this is powered through AWS, giving him some added safety and security layers that are critical for protecting his data from unwanted viewers.
Though [Manivannan’s] safety and security implementation doesn’t rise to the conventional of medical devices, maybe it will serve as a case study in the growing open-source medical device movement.