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Continuous heart rate and body temperature

monitoring system using Arduino UNO and
Android device
Conference Paper December 2015
DOI: 10.1109/EICT.2015.7391943

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M. A. H. Akhand
Khulna University of Engineering and Tech
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2015 International Conference on Electrical Information and Communication Technology (EICT)

Continuous Heart Rate and Body Temperature

Monitoring System using Arduino UNO and Android
Device
Md. Asaduzzaman Miah, Mir Hussain Kabir, Md. Siddiqur Rahman Tanveer and M. A. H. Akhand
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
Khulna University of Enginnering & Technology
Khulna-9203, Bangladesh
AbstractAn integrated portable device for continuous heart

rate and body temperature monitoring system development

is presented in this paper. Heart related diseases are
increasing day by day; therefore, an accurate, affordable
and portable heart rate and body temperature measuring
device is essential for taking action in proper time. Such a
device is more essential in a situation where there is no
doctor or clinic nearby (e.g., rural area) and patients are
unable not recognize their actual condition. The developed
system of this study consists of Arduino UNO
microcontroller system, transmission system and Android
based application. The system gives information of heart
rate and body temperature simultaneously acquired on the
portable device in real time and shows it through the
connected Android application instantly. The developed
system is more affordable with low price compared to other
developed devices due to use of easy available Arduino UNO
and smart phone as Android device. The developed device is
shown acceptable outcomes when compared with other
measuring devices.
KeywordsArduino UNO, Heart Rate, Body Tempareture, Pulse
Detection, Pulse Amplification, Signal Extraction.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Heart rate simply indicates the soundness of our heart. It

helps assessing the condition of cardiovascular system [1].
Human's heart pounds to pump oxygen-rich blood to muscles. It
carries cell waste products away from tissues [2]. Heart rate
varies according to the demand of muscles to absorb oxygen and
excrete carbon dioxide changes such thing happen during
exercise or sleep [3]-[5]. Normally the heart rate which is
calculated for a resting person is about to 70 bpm for adult males
and 75 bpm for adult females. A heart rate monitor is simply a
device that takes a sample of heartbeats and calculates the heart
beats per minute and the information can easily track the current
heart condition [6].
On the other hand, body temperature is also a general
indication of body condition. Normal human body temperature
is (98.6 F 0.7F) and it varies activity of the person as well
as place of measurement. When a person is too hot, the blood
vessels in his/her skin expand to carry the excess heat to his/her
skin's surface. And for this reason the person begins to sweat.
Then the sweat evaporates and this process helps to cool his/her
body. When a person is too cold, his/her blood vessels narrow

978-1-4673-9257-0/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

189

so that blood flow to his/her skin gets reduced to conserve body

heat. As a result he/she starts shivering and it is an involuntary,
rapid contraction of the muscles.
Timely measurement of heart rate and body temperature is
important for better treatment. In this era of polluted
environment, concern regarding human health is top priority
than ever before. Everything gets meaningless if one is sick or
dead. Now a days, people spend a lot of money to keep sound
health. Unfortunately, most of the cases it is found that it is too
late to receive proper medical treatment and things are noninvertible. So that unexpected incident happens for being
delayed treatment. Since heart rate and body temperature are the
most vital notable indexes of the human health, an affordable
device to measure such indexes will be helpful for human health.
In general, medical equipment is expensive. Moreover, some
devices can provide raw medical calculation of data to patients
and doctors, but the patients cant always interpret the medical
measurement into meaningful diagnosis as they have simple/no
medical background. In emergency situation, time should not be
wasted. Sometimes continuous assessment is also necessary.
Therefore, an automated system for continuous measuring of
heart rate and body temperature is very much essential.
In this study, an android assistive integrated heart rate and
body temperature measuring embedded system is developed.
Since the system provides the information about both heart rate
and body temperature through android application, anyone can
monitor physical status easily. Moreover, the system may be
useful for monitoring condition of vary seek patents from
remote place. Rest of the paper explains existing approaches,
our system model, system development and finally system
performance measurement.
II.

EXISTING APPROACHES

There are some existing approaches designed and developed

for measuring heart rate. At present, the recent technologies for
measuring heart rate are consist of several methods using
optical and electrical methods. Casually electrical method
provides a bulky strap around ones chest [7]. But the optical
method requires no such strap and it can be used more
effectively. Low cost heart rate measuring devices were
developed using optical technology. In optical method powerful
LED and Light Dependent Resister (LDR) are used to sense
pulses [8]. The pulse signals are then amplified by an amplifier
circuit and filtered through a band pass filter. The amplified and

filtered pulse signals are sent to the microcontroller. The

microcontroller checks the analog signals whether they are
valid or not comparing with a standard voltage. Microcontroller
counts the heart rate and displays the result in a LCD display.
There exists another approach where infrared Tx and Rx are
used. In that system it senses pulses, amplifies the pulses and
filters pulses by a low pass filter. Finally, the pulse signal is sent
to a microcontroller [9], [10]. The microcontroller also give
output comparing with a reference voltage. Both the approaches
give inaccurate result in many cases because analog signal of
pulse varies from person to person and the approaches fail to
calibrate analog signal of pulses for each person.
M. M. A Hashem et al. [8] developed a device which uses
infrared technology to measure heart rate and use analog
temperature sensor to measure body temperature. This
approach can calibrate analog signal of pulses for each person.
It uses wireless terminal to send data and wireless receiver to
receive the data. The data are then sent to the computer using
serial port. Data is then sent to the web server using the internet
and can be viewed from anywhere in the web browser. The
main drawback of this approach is that it needs a computer to
send data to the web server through the internet.
A telemedicine system is presented by N. Navale et al. in
[11]. In the system, the user carries a hardware device
connected with an android application through Bluetooth
connection. The device continuously measures the heart rate
and body temperature and sends these information to the
android application. Android application sends the information
to the server and if the user has any problem like heart attack
then it sends an emergency message to the patients doctor and
guardians containing the current location of the patient. N.
Indumathy, and K. K. Patil [12] developed an android based
patient health care monitoring system using several sensors like
temperature, heart rate measuring sensor, eye blink detection
sensors to detect the current condition of the patient. The system
is developed such a way that if patients cant speak or move his
hand or body then just blink his/her eyes 5 times then a message
send to the caretaker about the current situation of the patient
and continuously send the information about heartbeat and
body temperature to the server. An android application running
in the caretaker phone receive the message and generates voice
sound so that caretaker can recognizes the patients current
situation. At the same time, doctor can realize the current
situation of the patient accessing the server.
The aim of our study is to develop a device which is
interfaced with an Android application so that the heart rate and
body temperature are monitored easily. The exiting remote
health monitoring system described above are fully dependent
on proper communication between the server and client. So it
may arise severe condition that server connection gets congested
and patients situation is serious then it creates a problem to
recognize the present situation of the patient. For this reason the
goal of our project is to design a portable Android assistant heart
rate and body temperature monitoring device which is affordable
and user friendly, at the same time inexpensive, accurate, and
durable.

190

III. HEART RATE AND BODY TEMPERATURE MONITORING

SYSTEM USING ARDUINO UNO AND ANDROID DEVICE
To construct an efficient and affordable device for measuring
heart rate and temperature, an infrared Tx and Rx have been used
to measure the pulse by measuring the change in blood flow
through one of the fingers. A noise filter has been designed to
filter out any unwanted noise and interference, due to small
movement of finger causes excess noise. A temperature sensor
has been used to measure body temperature. The microcontroller
of the Arduino UNO board is programmed to count the pulse
rate and to measure the body temperature and to send the
information to the developed Heartmate android application
via Bluetooth module. Fig. 1 shows the working diagram of the
system and the Fig. 2 represents the functional block diagram of
the system. The following sections briefly explains of the
system.

Figure 1. System diagram of the proposed system.

Figure 2. Functional block diagram of the system.

A. Heart Rate and Body Temperature Sensing

With a view to measuring the alteration in blood volume at
fingertip with each heartbeat optical sensor has been used to
perform this task. The sensor unit consists of an IRTx and IRRx,
placed side by side. An infrared light is transmitted by IRTx into
the fingertip, and the IRRX senses the portion of the light which
is reflected back. The intensity of the reflected light depends
upon the blood volume inside the fingertip. As a result each
heartbeat slightly alters the amount of reflected infrared light
that can be detected by IRRx. Through proper signal
conditioning this little change in the amplitude of the reflected
light is converted into pulse. The sensor used in this project is
TCRT5000 which is a reflective optical sensor that contains both
the infrared light emitter and phototransistor placed side by side.
They are enclosed inside a leaded package as a result the effect
of surrounding visible light is minimum. Connecting the Enable
pin to 5V of Arduino will turn the IR emitter LED on and
activate the sensor. A fingertip placed over the sensor will act as

a reflector of the incident light. The amount of light reflected

back from the fingertip is monitored by the photo transistor. The
output (VSENSOR) shows in Fig. 3 from the sensor is a periodic
physiological waveform attributed to small variations in the
reflected IR light and it is caused by the pulsating tissue blood
volume inside the finger.

potentiometer is placed at the output of the first signal

conditioning stage in case the total gain of the two stages is
required to be less than 10201. If a heartbeat is detected then an
LED connected to the output of the second stage of signal
conditioning will blink. The final stage a simple non-inverting
buffer is implemented so that output impedance will be lower.
While reading the amplified PPG signal through the ADC
channel of a microcontroller is used to then it helps much. After
that the output is connected to the Digital Pin 8 of Arduino
UNO. The diagram shows the configuration of the IR emitter
and IR receiver in relation to the finger. They are placed in such
a way that the infrared light reflects from the finger to the to the
IR receiver.

Figure 3. Pulse Detection Circuit

The waveform is synchronous with the heartbeat. This weak

signal contains a lot of noise superimposed on the AC signal
which is then filtered through a series of signal processing
circuits via a Quad OP-AMP LM324N. To get rid of the DC
component the signal is first passed through a RC high-pass
filter (HPF) showed in Fig. 4. The cut-off frequency of the HPF
is set to 0.7 Hz. An active low-pass filter (LPF) which is made
of an Op-Amp circuit is on the next stage. The gain and the cutoff frequency of the LPF are set to 101 and 2.34 Hz respectively.
As a result the combination of both HPF and LPF helps to
remove unnecessary DC signal and high frequency noise which
includes 50 Hz mains interference, while amplifying the low
amplitude pulse signal (AC component) 101 times. In Fig. 5
shows the further filtering and amplification of the output from
the first signal conditioning stage goes to a similar HPF/LPF
combination. For this reason the total voltage gain achieved
from the two cascaded stages is 101*101 = 10201. The two
stages of filtering and amplification converts the input signals to
near TransistorTransistor Logic (TTL) pulses which are
synchronous with the heartbeat. A 10K

Figure 5. Second Stage Signal Conditioning Circuit

A high frequency noise is caused due to a small movement

of finger. For this concern the pulse rate signal filtering is
important to block any higher frequency noises present in the
signal. Using a low pass filter the desired signal can be extracted
from the noisy signal. The equation for cut-off frequency of the
low pass filter is represented through eqn. 1.
Cut-off Freq. = 1 / (2 RC)

(1)

2.34 Hz is the cut off frequency of the filter which is

designed for our system. If it is not amplified then the signal
found from the filter circuit which amplitude is in mV level.
With a view to understanding and counting pulse rate by the
microcontroller it is must to amplify the signal. For this purpose
a two stage signal filter and amplifier circuit using LM354
OpAmp is designed. This OpAmp is operated through 5 volts.
Gain of each stage of the low pass filter is represented through
the eqn. 2.
Gain at each stage = 1+ (Rf / Cf )

(2)

In the circuit, total gain is 10201. Values of Rf and Ri are

680 K and 6.8 K respectively. The 4.7uF capacitors are
connected in series to the inputs of each filter blocks and they
must be able to stand some reverse bias. For this purpose they
should be non-polarized.
Figure 4. First Stage Signal Conditioning Circuit

191

LM35 sensor has been used for measuring body temperature.

According to body temperature the sensor outputs an analogue
voltage. To reduce output drift due to noise in input voltage a
1uF capacitor is connected across the Vin and ground of the
sensor. The temperature sensor circuit diagram is shown in Fig.
6.

Figure 6. Temperature Sensing Circuit

For basic Centigrade temperature sensor whose rating is

(+2Cto +150C). And its temperature vs. voltage relation is in
represented throuh eqn. 3.
Vout = 0 mV + 10.0mV/C

(3)

B. Data Processing through Arduino UNO

In this project we used the Arduino UNO development board
which contains ATmega328 microcontroller and the
microcontroller is used to calculate the number of heart beats per
minute. It also measures the body temperature and sends the
calculated values to the android application via HC-05 Bluetooth
module. A thread continuously takes the analogue signal of heart
condition and body temperature and sends the values to the
android application. If the signal voltage is above the threshold
voltage, then it is considered as a heartbeat as detected and
counts up to 30 beats. A timer counts the time (t30) for 30 beats
and calculates heart rate using eqn. 4.The program
Beats per minute (BPM) = 30f

(4)

also takes the analogue voltage output (Vout) of the temperature

sensor and measures the body temperature by the following eqn
5 and 6.
temp = temp 0.48828125

(5)

tempf = (temp1.8) + 32

(6)

C. Android Application Development to Store and Display

In our system, development of android application, called
Heartmate, is a vital portion. We monitor the heart rate and
body temperature through this application. When the heartbeat
and body temperature are measured the microcontroller sends
the result to the application through the HC-05 Bluetooth
module. Instantly the current condition of the patient is
displayed in the application interface. So that anyone can easily
understand the present situation of the patient and can take
immediate action.

192

Figure 7. Algorithm for Measuring Heart rate and Body Temperatur

D. System Overview
Fig. 7 shows the system flow chart. At first the system
checks the bluetooth connection between the processing unit
and microcontroller and the Android device. If the connection
is ok then placing the finger in the infrared sensor the
microcontroller gets the some analog frequency for
corresponding blood flow. Placing the finger infront of the
infrared sensor an the receiver gets the transmitted signal from
transmitter. After that, using both high pass filter, low pass filter
and amplifier circuit shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 the signal is
made computable by the microcontroller used in Arduino UNO.
The temperature sensor also outputs an analog signal in parallel
while the heart beat signal is captured is shown in Fig. 5. For
getting good performance 30 values are taken then the average
values is considered the appropriate ones. When the signals are
digitized by the microcontroller sends the heart rate and body
temperature to the android Heartmate application through
HC-05 Bluetooth module. Through this approach it is now
become very easy for continuous heart rate and body
temperature monitoring

IV.

PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

Fig. 8 represents the bread board implementation of heart

rate and body temperature measuring hardware module unit of
our implemented system. In our implemented system the user
has to start the hardware module first then run the Heartmate
android application. The IR transmitter and receiver are

For performance checking of our system, we measured the heart

rate for a person for 20 minutes and the result is shown in the
Fig. 10. In this process we measured the heartbeat through
Sphygmomanometer which represents the actual measurd heart
rate in the Fig. 10. At the same time we measured the heart rate
placing our device in the left thumb of the person. Since a little
movement of the fingure while measuring heart rate through our
system the the analog value for corresponding blood flow is
affected by noise. As a result we got some errors in our
experimental results. For this reason we got appropriate value
at beginning of our experiment then after passing several
minutes the result deviated much from the original value. While
measuring body temperature we measurd the actual temperature
through clinical Thermometer. And along with this we also
measured the body temperature with our device. Fig. 11 shows
the actual and measured body temperature. We got some
varriance in the measured value.
85

Heart Rate(Bpm)

E. Significance of the System

In this system we have tried to implement a low cost heart
rate and body temperature monitoring system. We have
implemented the system in Android platform since Android
devices are available in cheap price. The device is portable and
light weight so that it can be carried easily anywhere. Through
this system it is possible to monitor the heart rate and body
temperature continuously. As a result for those patients for
whom it is must to monitor the heart rate and body temperature
continuously then in that condition the system can be adopted
easily. The system can provide much support to know the
present condition of the patient if there is no doctor or clinic
nearby.

83
81
79
77

Measured
Actual

75
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Time (Minute)
Figure 10. Actual vs. Measured Heart rate measured for 20 minutes

99

mounted in a finger ring. Then touching the temperature sensor

the module begin to measure both heart rate and body
temperature. Fig. 9 shows the measured result in Heartmate
application.

Teperature

Measued
Figure 8. Heart rate and body temperature measuring device bread board
implementation.

Actual

98.5
98
97.5
97

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Time (Minute)
Figure 11. Actual vs. Measured Body Temperature for 20 minutes

V.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have shown a design of a heart rate and

body temperature measuring embedded system. The final
outcome of our approach is an android based portable heart rate
and body temperature measurement system with a suitable
architecture which can be applicable in medical and home
appliances in patient health monitoring system. The system has
been tested for some valid signal such as heart rate and body
temperature. The system gives comparatively better
performance than old hand measuring system.

Figure 9. Measuring Heart Rate and Body Tempearture

193

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