CoFight — A COVID-19 Wristband IoT Device

Overview

The brief: design an IoT product to optimize COVID-19 health protocol compliance. As case counts rose, hospitals became overloaded and could only prioritize the most urgent patients — the rest self-isolated, but still needed daily monitoring from an already-stretched health workforce. Our team built CoFight (COVID-19 Fight), a wristband that tracks a patient's oxygen saturation and heart rate, viewable through a web dashboard. As team lead, I managed schedules and meetings, and built the wristband's firmware and hardware along with the website's front and back end. Two teammates from Mechanical and Architecture Engineering supported the submission video, presentation, and poster.

System Architecture

Three parts: the wristband, the server, and the web interface. The wristband connects to Wi-Fi and periodically publishes oxygen and heart-rate readings over MQTT. Hospitals, health workers, and family can monitor patients through a browser on mobile or desktop.

The wristband itself splits into a main board and a charging board. The main board carries an ESP8266 MCU, a MAX30102 oxygen/heart-rate sensor, an OLED display, and two buttons — one for emergencies, one for power. The ESP8266's built-in Wi-Fi handles the connection to the server.

Demo

The demos below show the wristband sensing oxygen and heart rate, and the dashboard for monitoring patient data.