Heart Rate Monitor for Athletes in Activity

The current work presented in this paper is focused on the development of a heart rate (HR) monitoring system which allows the coach and/or a physical trainer to monitor in real time the HR of all his athletes while they are in an exercise activity, through an application developed on Android. The system has the possibility of sending the data of one or more athletes to a single module via Zigbee, and then retransmit them using the 3G network to a remote display and processing unit that does not require high-cost equipment. The system consists of a unit of acquisition and transmission of HR, a Gateway, and a monitoring and analysis unit. For the acquisition of the HR, which in a high performance athlete is estimated between 40–195 BPM (beats-per-minute), a chest strap is used including a HR sensor, which is connects to a microcontroller that detects the heartbeat as a High/Low pulse. The microcontroller is responsible for calculating the HR and the packing of the data for transmission to the Zigbee module. The Gateway is the sink node of the network where all the data coming from the different acquisition and transmission units of the HR is received. The Gateway manages the 3G module and the Zigbee module, and a microcontroller establishes the connection with the communications manager program hosted on the remote server and keeps it operative automatically. The mobile device consults the database and, through an interface, graphs of HR behavior are generated during the training.