2011 IEEE 7th International Colloquium on Signal Processing and its Applications

LED Indicator for Heart Rate Monitoring System in Sport Application

N.H.Mahmood1#, N.Uyop1, N. Zulkarnain1, F.K.Che Harun1, M.F.Kamarudin2, A.Linoby3
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia INSTEDT, Bangunan Kejora, Jalan Dato Onn, 81930 Bandar Penawar, Johor, Malaysia 3 Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Pahang, 26400 Bandar Tun Abdul Razak Jengka, Pahang, Malaysia
2
#

nasrul@fke.utm.my

Abstract This paper presents a current invention for monitoring the athletes heart rate during training or exercise session. A bracelet with different color code of Light Emitting Diode (LED) is designed as a wrist heart rate monitor. This color-coding makes the heart rate easier to monitor and enabling the user to know their heart rate range at a certain moment. Our works investigate the used of Zigbee and ANT+ as a transmission medium from transmitter (chest strap) to receiver (bracelet). Different colors signify different ranges of heart rate. Preliminary result demonstrated that it is very helpful for athletes and coaches to monitor the fitness level of athletes and regulate their exercise training regime in a more effective and safer manner. Keywords Light Emitting Diode(LED), Electrocardiogram, wireless heart rate, heart rate monitor, Zigbee, ANT+

feedback to a user via specific color (LED). The Zigbee and ANT+ wireless protocol are chosen as a transmission medium because each of wireless protocol has their own advantages. Zigbee communication protocol is applied in this paper as it provides a small volume, high expansion, low power consumption, stylization and two-way transmission [3]. Meanwhile, the ANT+ is the most suitable communication protocol due to ultra low power consumption compared to Bluetooth [5]. II. METHODOLOGY AND PROTOTYPE DESIGN In this section, the application of Zigbee and ANT+ as a communication protocol tool are described. Both application are conducted separately or in other words, there are two different experiments which are the application using Zigbee, and the other one using ANT+ as communication protocol between transmitter and receiver. Figure 1 shows the whole steps of the work for designing the prototype that communicates with ZigBee.

I. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, the use of a heart rate monitor is very common and not merely use at the hospital as a patient monitor. Generally, heart rate monitor was used by a person who cares about their heart to ensure that they have a normal heart rate. The early detection of the abnormal heart rate can help to prevent from the serious disease. In the sport field, the heart rate monitor is needed to determine the range of heart rate. This range of heart rate should be compatible with the exercise done by an athlete to get an optimum exercise and to prevent from serious injury. Such digital display of target heart rate did not provide for ease of reading the display under the most conditions of use, particularly when the user is exercising vigorously [1,4]. Hence, this paper proposed an innovation to respond to this problem by providing an easily viewed target heart rate monitor which displayed a uniform color homogenously across the entire surface of the monitor, enabling a user to tell at a brief glance, whether they are exercising at a suitable intensity. The proposed innovation will be programmed to automatically suggest user with the optimum heart rate zones in accordance to their exercise goal, without having to perform any entangled calculation. The work will only be focused for sport training application and inspired by [2]. This prototyping can monitor appropriate heart rate exercise training zone while performing an exercise by sending

Battery

ADC

ZigBee

Microcontroller

Multicolor LED Fig. 1 Zigbee wireless network connected to the microchip.

The work starts by gathering all the data and information needed from the pulse oximeter. The PIC16F1827 microcontroller is used due to the small power has a surface

978-1-61284-413-8/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

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2011 IEEE 7th International Colloquium on Signal Processing and its Applications

amount microcontroller and serial port interface (SPI). The data that have been processed by microcontroller will be displayed through an LED indicator on the bracelet as well as on computer screen. This LED indicator is able to show the different colors that indicate the range of heart rate. The data from the microcontroller is also sent to the computer via ZigBee wireless network connected to the microchip MRF24J40. Instead of using Zigbee, another communication protocol that has been chosen is ANT+. It used to control and program the heart rate data that had been received from ANT+, the microcontroller is used. Initially, microcontroller will calculate the heart rate maximum (HRmax) and determine target heart rate zone desired by user. This HRmax obtained by inserting the user age and gender information. The formula use to calculate the HRmax is presented in equation (1) and (2) respectively for male and female[2]. Male : HRmax= 206.9 - (0.67 x age) Female : HRmax= 212.9 - (0.67 x age) (1) (2)

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS Currently, the prototype of color coded heart rate monitoring system is successfully designed for both applications using Zigbee and ANT+. For Zigbee application, the pulse oximeter is used to measure the heart beat and tracks heart beats per minute continuously. Figure 3 shows the conceptual drawing of the bracelet. This design of bracelet has used the cloth material for more ergonomic design.

Zigbee Module with Microcontroller module

Then, equation (3) is used to calculate the target heart rate (THR) zone. THR = HRmax x % intensity (3)

Multicolor LED

Conductive thread

Cloth material

Fig. 3 The conceptual drawing of the bracelet Conductive thread was used to connect the electronic devices with the multicolor LEDs. A board consists of ZigBee and the microcontroller module is placed in the middle of the bracelet. The prototype design of a bracelet is shown in Figure 4 with multicolor LED shows the different colors that signify the range of the heart rate. The range of heart rate [2] can be classified into five zones as described details in Table I.

The complete block diagram of heart rate monitoring system design from chest strap to bracelet is shown in Figure 2. The chest strap (transmitter) will detects the voltage different on the skin during every heart beat. The nRF24L01 which is act as wireless protocol will communicate with chest. Finally, the data is processed by microcontroller and the result is displayed through the LED strip. The color of LED strip will indicates the target heart rate zone desired by user. The LED strip chosen is a RGB LED with a serial peripheral interface (SPI) controlled. It is the 5V multicolor strips and is controlled by an HL1606 chips.

nRF24L01 Chest strap Fig. 4 Bracelet Prototype design Table I is also used as a reference for ANT+ application. Instead of using multicolor LED with conductive thread as described earlier, the LED strip is also capable to show different colors that indicate the range of certain target heart rate. The design of LED strip is shown in Table II.

LED strip

Microcontroller

Fig. 2 Block diagram of heart rate monitoring system

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2011 IEEE 7th International Colloquium on Signal Processing and its Applications
TABLE I DESCRIPTION FOR TARGET HEART RATE ZONE

Target zone Zone1: Very light Zone2: Light

Intensity (%) 50-60% 60-70%

Zone3: Moderate

70-80%

Zone4: High

80-90%

Zone5: Maximum

90-100%

Exercise training recommended For recovery and cool-down exercises throughout the training season. Everybody for long training sessions during base training periods and for recovery exercises during competition season. Runners progressing towards events or looking for performance gains, particularly for half and full marathon training. Experienced runners for all year round training in varying length. Becomes more important during pre competition season. Very experienced and fit runners. Short intervals only, usually in final preparation for short running events.
TABLE II

Fig. 5 Example of device worn upon wrist IV. CONCLUSIONS The portable color coded heart rate monitoring system is design to be noninvasive, lightweight and easily worn so that the athlete feel comfortable and will not impeded their activities. This device also gives an advantage to coach to easily get the information about athlete heart rate condition by only monitoring the LED indicator on bracelet wearing by athletes. Future works will be focused on reducing the size of LED strips/bracelet to be worn as a wrist band and improving both of the data communication (Zigbee and ANT+) between the transmitter and receiver. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors would like to sincerely thank to Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (Sport Section) for the support and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) for the facilities and equipment provided for this research.

DIFFERENT COLOR OF LED STRIP BASED ON HEART RATE ZONE

REFERENCES [1] Daoming Z. and Branko C. Monitoring Physiological signals during running exersice, Proc. of 23rd Annual EMBS Int. Conference, 2001. pp. 3332-3335. [2] A.Linoby, Color-coded Heart Rate monitoring bracelets (COBRA) to guide specific exercise training intensity., RMI-UiTM (Patent), 2009. pp. 1-12. [3] N. Watthanawisuth, et al., "Wireless wearable pulse oximeter for health monitoring using ZigBee wireless sensor network," ECTI-CON, 2010, pp. 575-579. [4] Edwards C., Healthcaress hi-tech lifelines, Journal of Engineering & technology, 2008. Volume 3/14. pp.36-39. [5] Chen, Z., Hu, C.,Liao J, Liu S., Protocol architecture for wireless body area network based on nRF24L01, IEEE International Conference on Automation and Logistics, 2008. pp. 3050-3054.

Blue Zone1

Yellow Zone2

Green Zone3

Purple Zone4

Red Zone5

From Table II, it shows that the color coded is very helpful for training purposes. For example, if a coach wants to know whether their athletes are fit or not, it simply can be detected by looking at the Red color of the LED indicator. This invention gives the coach easier to evaluate athletes fitness instead of manually calculate the heart beat of their athletes. The prototype of this portable heart rate monitoring system is worn as a wrist is shown in Figure 5. Future works should be focused on reducing the size for more reliable for the athletes or any users.

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