Low-Cost Pulse Oximetry and Infra-Red Temperature Device for COVID-19 Patients
Abstract #
With the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, there was a pressing need for simple yet effective remote monitoring solutions. In this paper, we describe a low-cost device developed for monitoring COVID-19 patients. The device uses an ESP32 module and integrates two distinct off-the-shelf biomedical sensors: a pulse oximeter by MAXIM, and an infra-red (IR) thermometer by MELEXIS. The device communicates with a smartphone via Bluetooth which then sends the acquired data to a cloud-based platform. An initial evaluation was performed at Coimbra’s Polytechnic Institute, and covered reproducibility and agreement with standard clinical devices, revealing a strong correlation for the pulse oximeter and a necessity for further testing the IR thermometer.