The words “medical equipment” and “affordable” aren’t generally heard in the same sentence. Of course there are good reasons for this, including the fact that these devices must meet certain certification standards, and that some types of equipment are thankfully not needed outside of specialized situations.
However, with the wide availability of powerful computing devices like the Raspberry Pi, its become possible to create some medical devices without the backing of a large corporation. One such device is the Healthy Pi, an open source vital signs monitor based on the Raspberry Pi. It takes the form of a HAT that attaches to the 40-pin header, and allows you to monitor such statistics as ECG, respiration, and skin temperature, charting them out nicely on the integrated display.
While this device does have all of the features of a patient monitoring system, it does not have any of the medical certifications alluded to earlier, and is not approved for true medical or diagnostic use. According to the project’s Hackaday.io page, regulatory compliance and certifications are on the to-do list. Perhaps this type of device could become more accepted and useful in the future, bring down costs for quality medical care and advanced remote monitoring.
