The problem of shortage of medical devices in rural areas of Nigeria, cause a budget to be limited and constrained. Therefore, developing medical devices at low cost is one solution. This paper proposes an improvement, portability, and cost-effectiveness of the heart rate measuring devices being applied in the Rural Local medical in Akure South Local Government Area of Ondo State of Nigeria; through the development of a Low-Cost Portable Heart Beats Monitor using an Infrared Sensor and a Microcontroller. The development of the prototype is to function as an assisting device for a user which has a busy lifestyle to monitor the heart rate at any place in the real-time condition. This report contains the detailed procedures involved in designing the heartbeat monitoring circuit, developing the circuit design, and carrying out the performance evaluation of the system developed. In this project, Infrared LED and photodiode have been used as a sensor to measure a heart rate and a PIC16F876A microcontroller acts as a controller to process the input and output of the device. The development of the prototype starts with designing the sensor circuit, signal conditioning circuit, voltage regulator circuit, microcontroller circuit, and dual power supply unit. After the functionality test, these circuits were integrated with the output display. The prototype design is able to display the heart rate measurement in beats per minute (BPM) and the condition of heart rate either low, normal, or high heart rate on a 16×2 matrix Liquid Crystal Display (LCD).
Keywords: Monitoring, heartbeats, infrared sensor, low-cost
