Pulse Rate and Blood Oxygen Monitor to Help Detect Covid-19: Implementation and Performance

Covid has killed millions, and millions more are being infected every day. Severe infection causes Pneumonia associated with high pulse and breathing rates, and low blood oxygen. Pulse rate and blood oxygen are two parameters that doctors use to diagnose and measure Pneumonia and Bronchitis. Sensors for their measurement are widely available in developed countries, but their costs are prohibitively high for wide penetration in developing countries. Hardware prototypes incorporated with embedded software and IoT have been developed previously, but their costs have not been brought down sufficiently for wide penetration. We developed and tested the performance of an Atmel ATmega 328P MCU and MAX30100 sensor kit-based pulse rate and blood oxygen monitor. We applied the device on 12 subjects and compared the data with a commercially available, Rossmax SB150 pulse oximeter. A minimal deviation of 0.8175% for pulse rate and 0.425% for blood oxygen was obtained that endorses the accuracy of our algorithm and implementation. Cost analysis shows that implementation can be done at a cheap rate of about US$ 12 only.