What's Your Pi Plan??

My wife has a serious heart lung problem that causes her to black out. I would love to connect the Pi with bluetooth to a heart,sats monitor that can call me if she collapses. It must be able to tell the difference between snoozing and a blackout.

@ Andrew Morley: I am not capable of all this but hope that tool kits  will emerge to get all this kit talking to each other.

I hope it will be as simple as writing in html or building a r/c kit. I am sure you can learn to do 10 times your current abillity if you can find the time to research and play. I built my first transistorised curcuit at 49. I was stuck in the age of relays and diodes.

My wife has a serious heart lung problem that causes her to black out. I would love to connect the Pi with bluetooth to a heart,sats monitor that can call me if she collapses. It must be able to tell the difference between snoozing and a blackout.

@ Andrew Morley: I am not capable of all this but hope that tool kits  will emerge to get all this kit talking to each other.

I hope it will be as simple as writing in html or building a r/c kit. I am sure you can learn to do 10 times your current abillity if you can find the time to research and play. I built my first transistorised curcuit at 49. I was stuck in the age of relays and diodes.

Im new to electronics too mate. I think to do this you would need a microcontroller device on your wife measuring / sensing continuously etc ie out of parameter in heart rhythm, blood pressure, perhaps an acelerometer that senses periods of inactivity. You would proberbly need a combanation of these sensors to get a system that would be reliable. Ie it would only trigger a communication with you after a cardiac danger signal and a drop in pressure and non movement detected.

Anyway the point im trying to make is that the Rpi is great to learn on and tinker with it does have GPIO pins to connect to sensors but its power hungry in comparison to a dedciated arduino microcontroller and I think you may have problems powering a pi with batteries for 20 hours etc. As I said im learning too and I am in the process of buying a great book to learn microcontrollers called "making thing talk" by Tom Igoe (get the second edition) . If you wanted to build a system that monitors your wife this would be the way to go and this book would help. It seems like a complicated task, but like most things after learning in steps is actually easier to achive than you think. There are also many librarys of arduino C code online (maybe someone has done some of the hard programming work for you).

The arduino system is also avalable in a form called Lilypad(tm) (only one L) which is designed to be incorporated in clothing and is flexable and washable that may be of interest too.

The arduino and the Rpi have external boards you can buy giving GPRS/3G to the device. It can send a help signal from anywhere and also send the location of the person wearing it. Could even get a camera too or a VOIP sound module to activate once triggered from the device end (for privacy reasons).

great ideas.