Heartmonics

Heartmonics logo

Inspiration

With the advent of smartwatches, personal health data is one glance at your wrist away. With the rise of streaming, there are hundreds of playlists for every activity. Despite both of these innovations, people still waste minutes every day adjusting their music to their current activity. Heartmonics bridges this gap to save time and encourage healthy habits.

What it does

Heartmonics tunes your music to your current fitness activity level. Our device reads your heart rate, then adjusts the mood of your music to suit resting, light exercise, and intense work-outs. This functionality helps to encourage exercise and keep users engaged and enjoying their workouts.

How we built it

Our device is runs on a Raspberry Pi platform housed in an exercise armband. It reads heart rate data from a sensor connected via i2c and comfortably attached to the users forearm. A button integrated into the armband provides easy control of music like any other player, allowing the user to play, pause, skip, and rewind songs.

Challenges we ran into

In building Heartmonics, we faced several challenges with integrating all the components of our design together. The heart rate sensor was found to be very sensitive and prone to giving inaccurate results, but by reading documentation and making careful adjustments, as well as reinforcing our hardware connections, we were able to get the sensor calibrated and working reliably. Integrating our solution with SpotifyAPI using the spotipi library also came with a set of integration challenges, compounded by our unfamiliarity with the platform. Despite all of these challenges, we persevered to produce a polished and functional prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the ease of use of our final design. Since the concept is designed as a time saver, we're glad it can deliver on everything we set out to do. We also went above and beyond our original goals, adding music control via a button, mood indication on an RGB LED, sensor and song information on an LCD display, and an elevated heart rate warning indicator. These features elevate Heartmonics and

What we learned

We learned the importance of careful hardware selection, and reading documentation. We leveraged and reinforced our teamwork and planning abilities to quickly build a functioning prototype.

What's next for Heartmonics

The functionality of Heartmonics could be integrated into a smartwatch app for a more elegant implementation of our concept. With wearable integration, users could employ our concept with potentially no additional cost, making Heartmonics widely accessible. Another potential addition is to make configuring which songs play for each mode user-accessible, so everyone can tune their Heartmonics to the tune of their heart.