A team of Sensor CDT students demonstrated their research projects at the Cambridge Science Festival
A student team from the 2016 MRes cohort presented their pulse oximeter which they built during their Guided Sensor Project in December.
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Carolina Orozco, Elise Siouve, Francesco Tonolini and Sammy Mahdi presented their Arduino based pulse oximeter to the general public in the Life Sciences Marquee on the first Saturday of the 2017 Science Festival.
Children were fascinated by a pulsing heart appearing on the computer screen as they put their fingers on an LED and the reflected light was detected with a photodiode.
Adults were interested to learn how the setup worked and surprised about how easy it seems to build a sensor that can measure pulse rate, blood oxygen level and temperature with a few electronics parts and an Arduino microcontroller.
As Carolina, Elise, Francesco and Sammy can testify, designing and building a sensor is not as easy as one might think.
Oliver Vanderpoorten, currently in his first year of PhD, demonstrated different microscopy techniques, including a lens-free setup to look at living mirco organisms in water droplets and an inverted microscope to study brain cells.
