Bike Luminance is a Kickstarter project that aims to create a bike helmet with a motion reactive lighting system that will signal your turns with the tilt of your head. A prototype of the helmet has LED lighting that blinks to signal a right turn, left turn and stop, depending on how you incline your head while riding. Continue reading Bike Luminance Turns to Motion Reactive Helmet Lighting
Tag: Arduino
An “Open” Solution to Measuring Your Heart Rate?
The idea of measuring a person’s heart rate using an optical pulse sensor is certainly not a new concept. Shine a light source through a fingertip or an ear lobe and the light either bounces back to the light sensor or it is absorbed by the blood. The number of times that the light is bounced back is the sensor is the number of time that your heart is beating or your pulse rate. It is pretty simple, so why are we still using heart rate monitors with straps that wrap around our torsos? Why can’t the average athlete clip on an optical sensor to an ear lobe, have their heart rate taken using an optical sensor and have that information transmitted (maybe via BlueTooth) to a recording devise with a digital display? That may all change with a new open-source optical heart-rate pulse sensor from two Physical Computing professors at the Parsons the New School for Design.
Yury Gitman and Joel Murphy have recently achieved, and far exceeded, their fund raising goal of $3000 using KickStarter.com to mass produce their new optical heart-rate pulse sensor, the Pulse Sensor. The new Pulse Sensor, along with the processing software, plugs right into another open-source item – the Arduino platform. Their new sensor is currently being marketed to students, artists, athletes, developers or anyone else looking to develop a device to record a heart rate.
Video after the jump Continue reading An “Open” Solution to Measuring Your Heart Rate?