Final Project Research — Seebscribe My Heartbeat
Market Research: Heartbeat as Media
Fab Academy 2026 · Formshop Lab, Shanghai · Yaroslav Artsishevskiy
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Section 1 — Existing Devices & Projects
The following devices and installations already exist in the market or the arts/research space. Each reads or streams a heartbeat signal for consumer or creative purposes.
Polar H10 Heart Rate Sensor
The gold-standard ECG chest strap wearable trusted by athletes and researchers worldwide, streaming precise beat-by-beat data over Bluetooth and ANT+ simultaneously. Its open SDK and Polar Open AccessLink API make it one of the most hacker-friendly commercial HR sensors available.
MAX30102 PPG Breakout Module (Maxim / Analog Devices)
A compact, low-cost optical heart-rate and SpO2 sensor IC widely used in maker and wearable projects, communicating via I2C and easily paired with any microcontroller. DFRobot, SparkFun, and dozens of vendors sell ready-to-use breakout boards that output BPM directly.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer — Pulse Topology (2021)
A landmark large-scale art installation in which 3,000 suspended light bulbs each pulse with a different visitor's heartbeat captured by touchless PPG sensors — storing the last 6,000 heartbeats as a living, collective memento mori. The series (2006-present) has toured MoMA, the Hirshhorn, Art Basel, and Superblue Miami.
Krista Kim — Heart Space (2024)
An immersive gallery installation powered by Tenbeo AI that captures each visitor's ECG, extracts a unique personal "Heart Signature", and projects it as living waves of color and light across the walls and ceiling. Part of the Techism movement, which uses technology to surface human emotion and connection.
RockMyRun — Biometric Music App
A fitness app that connects to any Bluetooth heart rate monitor and uses digital signal processing algorithms to dynamically adjust music tempo in real time to match the user's live BPM — the first consumer product to fully close the loop between body rhythm and audio.
Heart Fire — Live-Stream Concert System (Research)
A research prototype connecting online concert audiences to musicians via smartwatch heart-rate data, translating collective audience BPM into a real-time animated fire visualisation visible to the performer during the show — the first system to enable continuous physiological feedback between remote audiences and live musicians.
Heart Bot — Interactive Drawing Installation
A robotic arm installation that reads visitors' heartbeats via a pulse sensor embedded in a podium and uses the live data to draw a collective clock-like spiral in real time — exhibited at the New Museum New York, Intel San Francisco, and donated to Feeding America for gallery tours.
Section 2 — Outputs & Applications
The heartbeat signal can be transmitted over BLE and consumed in several distinct creative and functional modes. Five possible output directions for the Seebscribe device are described below.
1. Heartbeat-Driven Light Object
A physical lamp or light sculpture — potentially built on the organic lattice form from Fab Academy Week 2 — that pulses with live heartbeat data received over BLE. A second XIAO/ESP32 inside the object drives WS2812 LEDs through the structure, making the body's rhythm visible as slow, breathing light.
2. Heartbeat-to-Sound Instrument
The BLE signal feeds into a computer or a second microcontroller with a speaker, turning the wearer's heartbeat into the tempo or trigger for generative sound. A small sculptural box becomes a musical instrument played simply by being alive — highly demonstrable at a Fab Academy final presentation.
3. Shared Pulse — Two-Person Connection Device
Two wearable sensors, two people, one shared output. A light object or small screen visualises the relationship between both heartbeats in real time: converging, diverging, or synchronising. Inspired directly by Lozano-Hemmer's framing of the heartbeat as an involuntary response that cannot be controlled.
4. Heartbeat Journal / Daily Data Portrait
A wearable that logs heartbeat patterns throughout the day and generates a daily "portrait" — a visualisation, a 3D-printable form, or a laser-cut pattern unique to that day's rhythm. Product-oriented with clear appeal to quantified-self and wellness users.
5. Heartbeat-Reactive Wearable
The sensor is embedded in a wristband or garment, with output LEDs sewn into the fabric that pulse visibly with each beat. Covers soft circuits, flexible PCB design, and fabric fabrication — a strong showcase of physical computing skills.
Section 3 — Problems Solved & Potential Customers
Each customer group below represents a real, unmet need that an open heartbeat wearable with BLE output could address.
| Customer | Problem | How heartbeat data helps |
|---|---|---|
| Live Performers / DJs | No feedback loop from audience during a show | Aggregate BPM stream shows crowd energy in real time, allowing sets to adapt |
| Interactive Installation Artists | Need biometric input without bulky, expensive equipment | Compact open BLE device that streams to any display or microcontroller |
| Educators & Workshop Facilitators | Difficult to make emotional engagement tangible or visible | Visible heartbeat data turns an invisible state into a physical, discussable signal |
| Wellness & Meditation Studios | Participants cannot "see" their own calm during practice | Real-time visualisation makes biofeedback embodied and self-reinforcing |
| Immersive Experience & Game Designers | Digital environments do not respond to the player's physiological state | Heartbeat as a live game mechanic or narrative trigger adds genuine bodily stakes |
| Makers & Researchers | Commercial PPG devices are closed ecosystems — no raw BLE output | Open-firmware wearable streams raw inter-beat interval data for custom applications |
The clearest gap in the current market is a maker-friendly, open-firmware wearable that streams raw PPG / inter-beat-interval data over BLE — without medical framing, proprietary apps, or gallery-scale budgets. The Seebscribe project occupies this space by treating the body's rhythm as an open, creative signal rather than a closed fitness metric.
Conclusion: Closest Competitor & Seebscribe Positioning
Among all existing devices surveyed in Section 1, the closest direct competitor to Seebscribe is the Polar H10 Heart Rate Sensor. The H10 is a chest-worn ECG strap that activates automatically when the skin becomes wet during training, streams beat-by-beat heart rate and RR intervals over Bluetooth and ANT+, and retails at approximately $100 USD. It is the gold standard for consumer-grade chest ECG, trusted by athletes, researchers, and sports scientists worldwide. Its open SDK allows developers to receive raw ECG waveform data, which places it in a different category from closed fitness wearables.
Seebscribe shares the same core function — capturing and transmitting a live heartbeat signal from the chest — but pursues a different direction on three axes: signal precision, sensing geometry, and openness.
Signal Precision — Phase Roadmap
The target is a signal that is clinically comparable in quality — not medically certified, but accurate enough that the raw waveform reflects true cardiac electrical activity rather than a processed approximation. This will be achieved in three hardware phases:
- Phase 1 — Chest only, AD8232 front-end. Two dry or gel electrodes on the chest, analog ECG output read by the ESP32-C3 ADC. Establishes the baseline signal, validates the electrode geometry, and produces a visible QRS waveform. Comparable in principle to the Polar H10, using the same chest placement logic.
- Phase 2 — Chest + wrist (Lead I ECG geometry), AD8232. One electrode on the chest, one on the inner wrist, forming a longer electrical baseline across the body. This is the same principle used in the Apple Watch ECG feature (Lead I configuration). The longer baseline produces a stronger differential signal, potentially exceeding the H10's short chest-only baseline.
- Phase 3 — Chest + wrist, MAX30003 front-end. The AD8232 is replaced by the MAX30003, an 18-bit ECG front-end with 2uV RMS noise floor, hardware R-peak detection, and configurable bandwidth matching the IEC 60601 clinical standard. At this stage the signal chain is clinically comparable in quality, transmitted as a raw waveform over BLE at up to 512 Hz.
Microcontroller Roadmap
The processing and BLE transmission side follows a parallel three-stage path, designed so each upgrade is a drop-in replacement without changing the surrounding PCB design:
- Stage 1 — XIAO ESP32-C3 (current). Already available. Arduino-compatible, USB programming, BLE and WiFi. ADC is noisy but sufficient for signal validation. Used to develop firmware, test electrode geometry, and build the BLE streaming pipeline. Fast iteration, zero additional cost.
- Stage 2 — XIAO nRF52840 (next purchase, ~¥100). Same XIAO physical footprint, drop-in replacement on the Yaroboard. Nordic nRF52840 chip — the same silicon used in Fitbit, Oura Ring, and professional medical wearables. Hardware floating-point unit enables real DSP filtering in firmware. BLE current draw is approximately 10x lower than ESP32-C3, extending battery life from a few hours to 25-60 hours on the same cell. Clean 12-bit ADC. This is the target chip for the production Yaroboard.
- Stage 3 — Custom nRF52840 module (EBYTE E73 or equivalent, ~¥15). The same nRF52840 chip in a bare stamp-hole SMD module soldered directly onto a custom-designed Yaroboard PCB. Eliminates the XIAO development board overhead, reduces BOM cost to ~¥15 for the BLE silicon, and gives full control over the final form factor. Programmed via SWD pads on the PCB. This is the final production version of the device.
Seebscribe vs. Polar H10 — Summary
The Polar H10 defines the benchmark: a closed, sport-focused ECG chest strap at $100, with excellent signal quality, long battery life, and wide app compatibility. Seebscribe starts from the same principle — chest ECG, BLE transmission, beat-accurate data — and extends it in three ways the H10 cannot: a chest-to-wrist Lead I geometry for a stronger signal baseline, a fully open data stream designed for creative and media applications rather than fitness tracking, and a progressive hardware roadmap that ends at a custom PCB costing a fraction of the H10's price. The H10 is the closest competitor. Seebscribe is its open, artistically-oriented successor.