Ever wanted to build a wearable wireless sensor but didn’t know where to start? A new sensor platform from Cooking Hacks aims to help researchers and electronics hobbyists measure biometric with an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi.
Cooking Hacks, the open hardware division of Libelium, have recently released a board called e-Health that allows users of open source communities develop wearable sensor systems for biometric or medical applications.
The e-Health is a sensor shield board that plugs in the Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards with an exact pin match. It provides a number of I/O interfaces to Arduino and Raspberry Pi so that it’s compatible with standard medical sensors.
You can plug the board into an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and use the added interfaces to externally connect nine biometric sensors including: SPO2 sensor that measures the oxygen in blood, airflow sensor to measure breathing, body temperature, electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor, glucometer, galvanic skin response (GSR – sweating), blood pressure (sphygmomanometer) and an accelerometer to measure movement and body position.
The information from the sensors can be monitored in real time or aggregated and analyzed later for medical diagnosis. The eHealth board also provides 6 wireless connectivity options that can be used to transmit the sensor information. These are: Wi-Fi, 3G, GPRS, Bluetooth, 802.15.4 and ZigBee.
The Cooking Hacks currently sells the e-Health board for 290 Euros. The price is a little too high for beginners, but it may be worth if you are planning to start-up a big biometrics or remote healthcare business.