Heart and sole - shoe-based heart monitoring: demo abstract

We present Heart and Sole, a shoe-based system that can track a subject's pulse through their feet. Heart rate monitoring can be used to enhance athletic training and assess risk for several health conditions, such as cardiovascular risk and Parkinson's Disease. Many solutions have been proposed to track people's heart rates in their daily lives, but none of them follow the user around without requiring the user to wear special devices. By incorporating sensors into shoes that the user already wears in everyday life, we can create a ubiquitous heart-monitoring system that follows the user around but also remains ambient in the environment. The sensors lie against the foot as part of the tongue of the shoe. The challenge is to differentiate the weak signal induced by arterial motion from the signal noise caused by musculoskeletal movement. Heart and Sole addresses this by amplifying the signal and identifying low motion points where we can more easily extract the signal. Our demo will have a demonstrator wearing a shoe with such a sensor in it, and demonstrating that their measured pulse matches up with the one being measured by our ground truth, a pulse oximeter.