SquadPulse

Dashboard for squad leader to monitor health stats of squad
Dashboard for User to upload new health data
Squad details for the leader
PPG waveform

Inspiration

In high-stake environments like military operations, emergency response teams, and extreme sports, health monitoring is not just a luxury it’s a necessity. SquadPulse aims to empower teams with real-time medical insights using PPG waveforms and metadata, ensuring mission readiness and proactive health management.

By extracting key biomarkers like heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and SpO₂ levels, SquadPulse can detect early signs of fatigue, stress, dehydration, and cardiovascular risks. AI-powered trend analysis enhances decision-making, allowing squads to respond before minor issues become critical.

With SquadPulse, we’re not just tracking health; we’re building a resilient, high-performance future where every heartbeat counts.

What it does

In today’s world, preventive healthcare is more important than ever. Fitness tracking has evolved beyond counting steps and it’s about understanding the body’s signals and making informed health decisions.

By integrating PPG-based biometrics, AI-driven insights, and personalized health analytics, modern fitness tracking can go beyond generic recommendations to adaptive wellness solutions. Whether it’s detecting early arrhythmias, monitoring recovery patterns, or personalizing training regimens, the future of fitness is precision-driven and data-backed.

From elite athletes to everyday users, real-time health tracking bridges the gap between fitness and medicine, ensuring that everyone can train smarter, recover better, and live healthier.

🚀 The future of health tracking isn’t just about numbers. It’s about unlocking human potential.

How we built it

We started by diving deep into the healthcare and fitness monitoring space, making sure we could truly understand the data we were working with. Using the Terra API, we gained access to critical biometric data, like PPG waveforms, and explored advanced techniques to extract meaningful insights. This allowed us to focus on important biomarkers such as heart rate, heart rate variability, and SpO₂. By training AI models to recognize patterns in the data, we were able to catch signs of fatigue, stress, or potential cardiovascular issues early, helping keep squad members healthy and ready. We also made sure to track trends over time, so we could make proactive decisions about fitness and well-being.

For the real-time analysis, we built an intuitive front-end dashboard with React.js to ensure that both squad members and healthcare professionals could easily interact with the system. On the back end, Python Flask helped us process the data quickly and efficiently, so the flow of information was seamless. We optimized our algorithms to handle large datasets without delays, ensuring that actionable insights were delivered in real time during training or missions. We also designed the system to be scalable, so it could be used in various environments, from field operations to high-performance sports. By combining cutting-edge AI, real-time processing, and a user-friendly interface, SquadPulse became a versatile tool to help teams stay healthy, safe, and mission-ready.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was ensuring the accuracy of the biometric data, especially from the PPG waveforms. These signals can be noisy and prone to fluctuations, which made extracting reliable heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and SpO₂ measurements difficult. To address this, we had to develop and fine-tune advanced filtering algorithms to ensure that we could accurately detect the key biomarkers. Additionally, synchronizing data streams from different sources like PPG signals, accelerometer data, and metadata was complex. Aligning these signals in real-time was crucial for providing accurate insights, and this required robust data integration techniques to ensure a seamless and synchronized experience.

Another significant challenge was adapting our AI models to handle the wide variety of physiological states in high-performance environments. The factors affecting health can vary greatly, such as fatigue, stress, or environmental conditions like temperature or altitude. This made it difficult to create machine learning models that could reliably detect early signs of health issues across different conditions. Real-time data analysis was another hurdle, as we needed to ensure that the system could provide fast insights without compromising accuracy. This required optimizing our algorithms for speed, streamlining data processing pipelines, and refining the system to handle large volumes of data efficiently. Gaining domain knowledge in health monitoring was also a learning curve, as we had to consult with healthcare professionals and experts to ensure that the insights we provided were both actionable and medically sound.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re incredibly proud of the proof-of-concept we’ve developed with SquadPulse, successfully integrating cutting-edge technology with real-time health monitoring for high-performance environments. Our system can detect key biomarkers such as heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), and SpO₂ from PPG waveforms, providing actionable insights that help individuals proactively manage health risks. The AI-powered trend analysis we implemented effectively identifies early signs of fatigue, stress, and cardiovascular issues, enabling smarter decision-making. We’ve also built a seamless, scalable system by combining AI models, a responsive React.js front-end, and a Python Flask back-end, ensuring real-time data analysis and intuitive visualization. This accomplishment reflects not only technical innovation but also our commitment to addressing real-world health challenges, making SquadPulse a valuable tool for squads, athletes, and healthcare professionals.

What we learned

Building SquadPulse taught us the importance of data preprocessing and synchronization, particularly with noisy PPG signals and aligning multiple data streams like accelerometer and metadata. We gained technical expertise in developing efficient algorithms for real-time health monitoring and learned the crucial role of context in interpreting health data. Understanding variables like fatigue, environmental conditions, and stress response was key to enhancing our AI models.

Additionally, collaborating with healthcare professionals and fitness experts broadened our knowledge of health monitoring in high-stakes environments. This experience helped us refine our system to provide medically relevant insights, ensuring our technology is not only accurate but also practical for real-world health management in demanding situations.

What's next for SquadPulse

Our next steps focus on enhancing the accuracy and adaptability of our AI models, particularly in detecting early-stage health issues like arrhythmias, dehydration, or stress, while providing more personalized insights based on individual health profiles. We plan to refine our algorithms and leverage additional data to improve the system’s ability to respond to complex, real-world health scenarios. Additionally, we aim to incorporate real-time alerts to notify users and teams of critical health conditions as soon as they arise.

Looking further ahead, we aim to integrate SquadPulse with additional features like personalized nutrition plans and adaptive fitness regimens, as well as develop early-warning systems for cardiovascular health. By expanding the system’s capabilities and minimizing latency, we plan to integrate SquadPulse with wearable devices and other health tracking platforms to create a seamless, all-in-one solution. Ultimately, we aim to empower individuals and teams to proactively manage their health and performance, making SquadPulse an indispensable tool for high-performance environments.