PennApps XVI: TattooCare

I went to the PennApps XVI hackathon (for 36 hours!) last weekend, and with a team of two other high school seniors and a nursing student at UPenn, created a smart tattoo system called "TattooCare". The team and I wanted to address the inconvenience of the bulky health monitoring system currently being implemented today by hospitals, a health monitoring system that greatly hinders the patient's day-to-day movement which is even so costly that it is rarely found in the comfort of one's own home.

TattooCare is low-cost, lightweight, wireless and somewhat imperceptible health monitoring system. The goal for TattooCare is to primarily allow for hospital patients to be able to move around more easily for two reasons: to allow for more mobile activity (exercise can help a patient recover faster), and improve a patient's quality of life while recovering in the hospital. TattoCare consists of a few key components: an Android Things NXP I.MX7D single-board computer hosting a Bluetooth GATT server, a voltage regulator, signal amplifier, Arduino MKR1000, and of course, the signature carbon-based ink tattoos.

Basically, the carbon-based ink tattoos detect skin moisture or muscle activity (EMG signals) from the differential voltage measurement across the tattoo. Based on another area of skin/body as a reference point, this data gets sent to an Arduino MKR1000 microcontroller, which then uses the Adafruit BLE SPI Bluetooth Friend Module to send data wirelessly over to the Bluetooth GATT server being hosted by the Android Things NXP board. This data is then displayed on a 5" touch display running an Android App for the patient/caretaker's viewing pleasure.

Here's a nice video of tattoo testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYz-HIFjVHE

Fun fact! The acrylic enclosure for the NXP board hosting the Bluetooth server was laser-cut using UPenn's laser cutters in its AddLab.