The Do-It-Yourself Electrocardiogram

Eileen Haase; Ryan O'Hara; Anil Maybhate

doi:10.1007/s43683-021-00061-0

The Do-It-Yourself Electrocardiogram

Biomed Eng Educ. 2022;2(1):83-90. doi: 10.1007/s43683-021-00061-0. Epub 2022 Feb 7.

Authors

Eileen Haase^#¹, Ryan O'Hara^#¹, Anil Maybhate^#²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA.
² Applied Biomedical Engineering - Engineering for Professionals, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Hands-on labs are a critical component of biomedical engineering undergraduate education. Due to both the pandemic and the growing interest in online education, we developed a Do-it-yourself Electrocardiogram (DIY EKG) project. The Arduino-based DIY EKG kit instructed students how to build a circuit to obtain their own EKG and then analyze their EKG data using Matlab. Despite the obstacles of virtually trouble-shooting, 85.4% of students (n = 103) were able to obtain their own EKG at home. We have provided the labelled circuit drawings, step-by-step instructions, Matlab files, and results in this paper. Survey results indicate that 89% of students felt the DIY EKG project was a "challenging yet fulfilling experience."

Supplementary information: The online version of this article contains supplementary material available 10.1007/s43683-021-00061-0.

Keywords: Arduino; Electrocardiogram; Experiential learning; Online teaching; Remote learning.