Development of a low-cost interactive prototype for acquisition and visualization of biosignals.

Nowadays, some of the most severe problems faced by health institutions are related to people's mental health. According to the World Health Organization, approximately one billion people lived with some condition that affected their mental health in 2020, where depression, anxiety, and stress represent the most common examples. Furthermore, according to the American Psychological Association, stress aggravates the symptoms of depression and anxiety, besides having negative effects on the cardiovascular, respiratory, muscular, nervous, reproductive, endocrine, and gastrointestinal systems. It is estimated that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of global cases of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders increased by 53.2 million by 76.2 million respectively. Psychophysiology and other health disciplines such as psychology, neurology, psychiatry and physiotherapy provide quantitative data from physiological signals. These signals are acquired by specialized systems that are usually very expensive, and most are closed source hardware and software. In this work, the development of a low-cost prototype for acquisition and visualization of a patient’s heart rate, ECG, EMG, GSR, and body temperature biosignals using the MAX30102, ECG AD8232, EMG Muscle T084, Grove GSR sensor and LM35 AFEs breakout boards respectively is proposed. Signal acquisition tests were performed with each sensor without post-processing or filtering. Our test results show that the biosignals acquired by our prototype present usability, correct morphology, stability, and can operate without errors for up to 12 hours. This is expected to provide an affordable alternative to biosignal acquisition systems for educational and research institutions, which would give users a similar experience to that provided by high-cost equipment, thus benefiting the training of studies.