Patient Monitoring
(BME, EE)
INTRODUCTION
Biomedical Engineering:
Biomedical engineers work hand-in-hand with other medical professionals to engineer new devices and equipment to improve human health. Engineering, medicine, and biology principles are integral applications in the biomedical field. Subdisciplines of biomedical engineering include the design of medical devices, orthopedic implants, biomedical signal processing, medical imaging, and clinical engineering.
Electrical Engineering:
Electrical engineering is a branch of engineering that deals with the study, design, and applications of electrical equipment, devices, and systems. Electrical engineers work on electrical equipment like motors, radar systems, navigation systems, communication systems, and power generation systems.
Project Description:
For Week 3, our team was tasked with monitoring a vulnerable patient for possible coronavirus systems. A circuit was created that would alert a patient based off of three risk factors: dry cough, increase in temperature, and decrease in oxygen levels. If the patient was risk-factor-free, the green LED would light up. With one risk factor, the yellow LED would light up, and with two, the red LED would light up. If the patient exhibited all symptoms, an alarm would be sounded and emergency services would be contacted. In our work with this project, we also created circuit diagrams and truth tables for our physical circuit.
DESIGN PROCESS
SERIES AND PARALLEL CIRCUITS
SERIES
The purpose of these circuits was to deepen our understanding of the differences in series and parallel circuits and their uses. The series circuit required the pushing of both buttons to turn on both lights as all switches and lights were apart of a connected current system.
IMG_9126.MOVPARALLEL
The parallel switch allowed for one light to turn on when one button was pushed and the other to turn on when the other button was pushed. The series and parallel circuits were both simple circuit types covered in Ch. 10 of our reading. Our physical circuit used combinations of the series and parallel to create something much bigger than the simple circuits covered.
CIRCUIT LAB
COLLEGE ADMISSIONS CIRCUITLAB
The purpose of the College Admissions CircuitLab was to deepen the team's understanding of how to use CircuitLab for our final circuit, as well as how to use truth tables and pin diagrams in conjunction with the CircuitLab.
CORONA CIRCUITLAB
We used CircuitLab to create a diagram for our program and help plan the logic. This software allowed us to quickly test our circuit and fix mistakes in a simple way, this is advantageous when prototyping the circuit. Compared to assembling the real circuit on the protoboard, this is a much simpler and more efficient process. When planning the logic of our circuit in the CircuitLab, we decided to invert the state of the switch that represents the oxygen saturation. This is because we thought that the switch represents an oxygen saturation sensor and for this specific symptom the reading that would concern us is not when the oxygen saturation is high, meaning a 1 on the digital reading, but actually when the sensor shows a reading of zero, meaning a low oxygen saturation.
PHYSICAL CIRCUITS
IMG_1194.MOV
The truth table, pin diagram, and CircuitLab diagram were all steps we took before moving on to our final circuit.
ALARM CIRCUIT
The alarm circuit was constructed according to the schematic provided. The main obstacle in constructing the alarm circuit was that the pin numbers did not align between the diagram and the actual IC 555.
TIMER CIRCUIT
Our timer used resistors and capacitors to create timed intervals. These intervals were integral to the design, as we did not want our circuit constantly reading inputs, so the outputs were more accurate. We connected an LED to indicate how fast the timer was. Once we realized the LED was blinking too fast, one of the resistors was changed to one with lower ohms. This slowed the intervals of the timer down. Once it was done, our timer circuit was connected to the flip flop.
LOGIC CIRCUIT
In our logic circuit, a combination of AND gates, OR gates, and invertors to create the logic. Outputs from the logic section went into the flip-flop, where it was outputted to light up the correct LED. The logic for this circuit indicated that if there were three symptoms an alarm would go off, two symptoms would cause a red light to go off, one symptom would trigger a yellow light, and the green light would be on if there were no symptoms. While considering the symptoms, we inverted the oxygen switch, as explained earlier, because it would make more sense if we were taking readings from a sensor to have a warning when oxygen levels were low. In our circuit we also used a color coding which made our lives much simpler when testing and identifying problems with the circuit. Basically, the input to the logic gates were represented by three colors: orange, purple, blue, which represented oxygen saturation, cough, and temperature respectivelly. For the outputs of the logic gates we used four colours: red, green, yellow, which represented the LEDs with those colors, and the color purple, which was used to represent the alarm.
RESEARCH PAPER
PROJECT EVALUATION