Capstone Project: Dr. Chi

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. Abstract In the Traditional Chinese Medicine, doctors diagnose patients by reading pulses from their wrists, so as to give out proper receipts of herbs curing patients across generations. In our capstone project, a mobile app with sensor gadget has been developed to detect, gather, convert and process pulse signals, and offer users valuable health suggestions. To get accurate pulse signals from wrists, several sensor prototypes have been developed and prototyped. The best-performing sensor, a piezoelectric sensor, is chosen and implemented in detail. Pulse data was processed to extract a stable pulse signal, in aspects of: amplitude of peak signal, and signal time period. From this information the app makes 'diagnoses' about the stress level and health condition of different organs of users. Finally, our mobile app delivers feedback to users, guiding them to healthier lives. The price of the Dr. Chi hardware, and mobile app is projected to be 30 dollars, and so promises to be orders of magnitudes more affordable than existing products for convenient health diagnoses.