Design and implementation of digital heart rate counter by using the 8051 microcontroller

The heart is an organ of human body which has a dynamic function, slight abnormalities in the heart functions could obligate life-threatening. The ability to provide accurate heart rate can save patients from serious death. The purpose of this article, is how to design a low cost and mobile heart-rate counting system based on the microcontroller for monitoring heart health. The heart pulse was acquired by using IR finger-tip sensor, based on this biomedical signal a conditioning circuit was designed for filtering these signal and processing it. As well, the processed signal was countered using a microcontroller and displayed on seven segment display. The results of this study are expected to let the physician team to monitor and easily reading heart rate. Based on the test results, the designed system gave a good response and an accurate heart rate counting with accepted low percentage error comparison to manual measurement. The designed system can be interface with personal computers. This will give opportunities to perform further analysis to distinguish and predict any other heart disease. However, the presented method in this developed system needs further investigation and need more functionality, which may be useful to consider in future research.