Real Time Heart Rate Monitoring System

Abstract

Heart rate monitoring systems are critical in modern healthcare, enabling continuous tracking of cardiovascular health. Traditional cloud-based solutions pose privacy risks due to centralized data storage and transmission vulnerabilities. To address these concerns, integrating homomorphic encryption with edge computing offers a secure and efficient framework for real-time heart rate monitoring.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain a leading cause of mortality worldwide. Wearable devices and IoT-based health monitoring systems provide continuous heart rate tracking, but data security and latency issues hinder widespread adoption. Heartbeat Sensor is an electronic device that is used to measure the heart rate i.e. speed of the heartbeat. Monitoring body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure are the basic things that we do in order to keep us healthy. In order to measure the body temperature, we use thermometers and a sphygmomanometer to monitor the Arterial Pressure or Blood Pressure. Heart Rate can be monitored in two ways: one way is to manually check the pulse either at wrists or neck and the other way is to use a Heartbeat Sensor. Pulse oximetry is used in this project to detect the heartbeat using fingers. When the heart expands (diastole) the volume of blood inside the fingertip increases and when the heart contracts (systole) the volume of blood inside the fingertip decreases. The resultant pulsing of blood volume inside the fingertip is directly proportional to the heart rate and if you could somehow count the number of pulses in one minute, that's the heart rate in beats per minute (bpm). For this an IR transmitter/receiver pair (LED) placed in close contact with the fingertip. When the heart beats, the volume of blood cells under the sensor increases and this reflects more IR waves to sensor and when there is no beat the intensity of the reflected beam decreases. The pulsating reflection is converted to a suitable current or voltage pulse by the sensor. The sensor output is processed by suitable electronic circuits to obtain a visible indication (digital display).