• 2020-07-12: What problem is VitaPatch trying to solve?

Vital signs are useful. They are used to detect medical problems. They are used to monitor a patient's health. But these vital signals are neither measured continuously in a healthcare facility (except ICU) nor at home. The consequences are significant. Either sudden changes indicating rapid deterioration may not be caught in time; or subtle trends showing health changes may not be found until a terrible impact occurs. 

With our society aging and COVID-19 pandemic in the background, it is crucial to have continuous monitoring for patients at homes and healthcare centres to prevent rapid deterioration and identify subtle but potential health risks. 

By measuring temperature, SpO2, blood pressure, pulse, and respiration rate all the time, VitaPatch is one low-cost integrated solution to address the above healthcare issues.

• 2020-07-12: Why VitaPatch?

When the pandemic happened in Wuhan China and Lombardy Italy, we watched their hospitals overwhelmed by the surge of cases. What if we could help some patients at home by monitoring their vital signs remotely? Without going to a hospital during the pandemic, many cross-infections could be avoided.

Apple watch is great but expensive. It is very hard to open it and even more difficult to hack it. What if we could have something low cost, open source and hackable? We could use our health data to educate ourselves for better.

• 2020-07-25: Hardware time 

Tin the pads. Solder the USB socket and 3v3 regulator. Put the BLE module on. Build the UF2 bootloader to test it. Use CircuitPython for simple and quick test. It is alive now.

Here is one short video, VitaPatch is breathing!