Electrocardiography for Cheap: DIY ECG Uses One LM741 Op-Amp, Five Resistors, and ‘Penny Electrodes’

Manhattan-style the circuit as well! (Or, you know, one hundred other ways to make it how you make things.) The schematic can be seen below and links to the code and further write-up can be found here at Scott Harden’s blog.

I made surprisingly good ECG from a single op-amp and 5 resistors! An ECG (electrocardiograph, sometimes called EKG) is a graph of the electrical potential your heart produces as it beats. Seven years ago I posted DIY ECG Machine on the Cheap which showed a discernible ECG I obtained using an op-amp, two resistors, and a capacitor outputting to a PC sound card’s microphone input. It didn’t work well, but the fact that it worked at all was impressive! It has been one of the most popular posts of my website ever since, and I get 1-2 emails a month from people trying to recreate these results (some of them are during the last week of a college design course and sound pretty desperate). Sometimes people get good results with that old circuit, but more often than not the output isn’t what people expected. I decided to revisit this project (with more patience and experience under my belt) and see if I could improve it. My goal was not to create the highest quality ECG machine I could, but rather to create the simplest one I could with emphasis on predictable and reproducible results. The finished project is a blend of improved hardware and custom cross-platform open-source software (which runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS), and an impressively good ECG considering the circuit is so simple and runs on a breadboard! Furthermore, the schematics and custom software are all open-sourced on my github!

Read more.


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