Thread: FryingMan's EILD (Halovision) experiments

Bought a Polar H7 bluetooth low energy heart rate monitor, particularly because I saw that they support 3rd party apps on their web site and have sample code. I successfully accessed the heart rate notification using the command line program "gatttool" using this very helpful site: Ali's Real Life Adventures: Polar H7 Bluetooth LE Heart Rate Sensor on Ubuntu 14.04 BLE programming is new and there are not many examples, the code that is out there is really confusing with no adequate tutorials, and the python BLE bindings out there are very immature, many do not compile/install properly even with pip. I will probably just repurpose the gatttool program for my needs. Read through a short Japanese paper on using heart rate for REM detection, but the actual algorithm was published in a different paper which seems hard to find. Not to worry, I'll just plan to gather data, associate data with my dreaming/wake schedule from the camera, and determine the patterns (if there are any!) that associate changes in heart rate with REM sleep/dreaming for me.

The H7 is not all that comfortable, but not terribly uncomfortable, either, but since I'm a side sleeper it shouldn't be too bad. With my custom program to access the data I should only have it transmitting once or twice a minute for just a few seconds, or at whatever frequency seems suitable.

Ideally I'd like to reproduce one of those under-the mattress heart-rate and breathing rate monitors, so that there's nothing to wear. Apparently they work (at least some of them) by measuring tiny variations in air pressure. Not a lot of data out on how those work.