What is VitalLink?
VitalLink is my capstone project, where I have the role of project manager. Therefore everything I post is what I worked on by myself. The idea of the project is to design and make a smart hospital wristband for use in the ER waiting room. The risk of death in the waiting room for the ER greatly increases when the wait is over two hours. The main cause of death in these cases is heart attacks, which was our main focus. It is basically a wristband that monitors vitals such as heart rate and blood oxygen levels and sends the data to the base station. Based on the vitals, the base station can alert staff to support a patient or just keep an eye on them if their vitals are rising. Furthermore, the base station can dynamically adjust the queue of the patients such that the most critical conditions can be addressed fast. The main advantage of our system is that it is fully localized and can be quickly deployed when the ER gets busy.
Where are the traces?
The circuit design is incomplete and is only being used for layout purposes. Almost all the times I complete the schematic before placing the components so I am able to draw the traces right away. The only reason I was not able to do this was that the shipping of the components needed was delayed, as we were not able to get tax exemptions approved in time. Therefore, I wanted to start on the design of the wristband in the meantime and needed a rough draft of the circuit board in order to implement this.
3D model
I used KiCad to design the layout PCB, linking the component footprints from DigiKey and also linking necessary step files that match the dimensions listed on the spec sheets. Then I aligned the component models to the footprints, allowing me to have a full model. While this model is not directly useful, it provides the team with an understanding of the estimated size and provides me with a way to start the design of the wristband.