The Do-It-Yourself Electrocardiogram

Hands-on labs are a critical component of biomedical engineering undergraduate education. Due to both the pandemic and the growing interest in online education, we developed a Do-it-yourself Electrocardiogram (DIY EKG) project. The Arduino-based DIY EKG kit instructed students how to build a circuit to obtain their own EKG and then analyze their EKG data using Matlab. Despite the obstacles of virtually trouble-shooting, 85.4% of students (n = 103) were able to obtain their own EKG at home. We have provided the labelled circuit drawings, step-by-step instructions, Matlab files, and results in this paper. Survey results indicate that 89% of students felt the DIY EKG project was a “challenging yet fulfilling experience.” SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version of this article contains supplementary material available 10.1007/s43683-021-00061-0.