No 3-day weekend would be complete without a project that’s, well, virtually useless. I present to you my new and improved ECG machine! Instead of using a single op-amp circuit like the previous entries which gave me decent but staticky traces, I decided to build a more advanced ECG circuit documented by Jason Nguyen which boasted 6 op amps! (I’d only been using one) Luckily I picked up a couple LM 324 quad op amp chips at radioshack for about $1.40 each, so I had everything I needed. I’ll skip to the results. In short, they’re gorgeous. Noise is almost nothing, so true details of the trace are visible. I can now clearly see the P-Q-R-S-T features in the wave (before the P was invisible). I’ll detail how I did this in a later entry. For now, here are some photos of the little device and a video I uploaded to YouTube. It’s not fancy.

UPDATE: Upon analyzing ~20 minutes of heartbeat data I found a peculiarity. Technically this could be some kind of noise (a ‘pop’ in the microphone signal due to the shuffling of wires or a momentary disconnect from the electrodes or perhaps even a static shock to my body from something), but because this peculiarity happened only once in 20 minutes I’m not ruling out the possibility that this is the first irregular heartbeat I captured with my DIY ECG. Note that single-beat irregularities are common, and that this does not alarm me so much as fascinates me. Below is the section of the data which contains this irregular beat.

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