Arduino + SPO2 Pulse Oximeter + Unity3D
After a recent hospital visit, I was given a disposable spo2 sensor to monitor my oxygen saturation and pulse which is standard practice these days. Rather than let the nurse toss my sensor afterwards, I decided to take it home and tinker with it. It would be pretty neat to have my own spo2 monitor at home, never know when it could come in handy! I am especially interested in the applications that it can be applied to in the gaming world, such as fitness gaming, so I created a Unity asset that can handle the readings and graph the results, much like an ECG.
A couple of you have asked for more details about the project so here’s everything I have so far (work in progress).
I couldn’t find much on the exact sensors that Masimo uses in their resposable SP02 sensors, so disclaimer: I’m just sort of winging it here, there is definitely more info needed to perfect this project… That being said, without wasting any more time, here is the project:
Project materials:
-Arduino Uno R3
-Masimo Universal Resposable SPO2 Pulse Oximeter
-Breadboard
-10k resistor
-220 resistor
-330 resistor
SPO2 sketch:
The circuit:
This handy tool I made in Unity reads the data we send to the serial com and graphs it for us in a manner that emulates an ECG.
Download Unity3D SPO2 grapher for Windows
You’ll notice that I commented out a few lines in the sketch. Enable these lines if you would rather plot your graph using an online tool such as FooPlot rather than the realtime Unity3d made monitor.
If you have any information to contribute for the advancement of this project, leave a comment or contact me and I’ll be sure to keep this article up-to-date with new findings! If you have any questions go ahead and leave those in the comments as well and I’ll do my best to answer any.
Hi Kevin,
We are trying to do your project and are having problems connecting the Arduino to Unity… We downloaded Unity 3D and are trying to use your code, but are running into some errors. For starters, how did you get it to graph into Unity? Is there an additional code for unity or package needed to produce the SPO2 output?? Any help would be GREAT!
Can you help us with the list of different components used in your circuit:
Like : Which photoresistor?
Range of Photoresistor.
How did you get the output without using any amplifier?
Can we use Arduino’s serial plotter?
Kevin, is the red/IR LED combination a single LED, or two? I teach a sensors class at a community college and I’m trying to figure out the pinout for the cable going to the sensor. I was hoping to not take the sensor off the cable. My sensor is a Masimo SpO2 single use sensor on an adhesive band that I was given by a student.
Thanks.
Great work, Kevin!
Thanks Matt 🙂