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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

Hello from Astana, Kazakhstan. I just spent wonderful night playing World of Warcraft, coding some lua addon for it and tinkering with VPS. It's Sunday's morning and I'm going to prepare more coffee. Now I need to endure till the evening so I can actually attend work at Monday with proper schedule. At work I'm working on creating an ECG device which hopefully will be useful and cheap for local hospitals. And some other projects which are more boring.

Have a good day or night or whatever time you're happening to have around.

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>ECG device

An ecg device saved my dad's life, it caught a weird heart murmur he was having and alerted the doctors to an issue with his heart. He's now better becuase we detected it early, its so wonderful there are people like you working on these devices that makes modern medicine do its thing. Thank you!

Also, how do you prepare your coffee?

Thanks for your kind words and I wish the best to your dad. Our agenda is to help people in remote cities and villages which often do not have skilled doctors, but thanks to Internet, it’s possible to connect those people to a more modern medicine. We’re not there yet, but we’re moving.

In the past I extensively used Bialetti moka pot. Recently I discovered Aeropress and using it almost exclusively now. I’m not very much coffee gourmand, I just need caffeine to convert it to code, lol.

The Aeropress is a great device. I have a few brewing methods (V60, kalita wave, french press), but the aeropress is the most consistent, and as a bonus, is so easy to clean up too.

PS Good to hear about your project, sounds like a great aspiration and could help so many.

Man, building an ECG. What is your job description? What kind of organization are you working for?

Also your English is excellent!

I think tech lead or something like that. It sounds more serious than it actually is. Electrical engineering is done by someone who knows his stuff, I'm more software guy. Actual ADC is Texas Instruments chip built for ECG applications. So we basically interact with it and deliver a recorded signal to UI and finally to our servers. We have working business and we integrated with some ECG devices which are used on the local market, but having our own device would allow for much better integration and interesting features. Well, management always have infinite stream of ideas.

The hard part is going to be a certification, I guess.

Very fun project! My best to you

If it's CE or FDA you're after, they are not that bad at all, I was tasked with it as an intern many moons ago and could complete both within 3 months starting from zero. It's a lot easier if it's the lowest level grade of medical device, otherwise you need clinical trials which are really difficult to organize. At the lowest level it's basically just a bunch of documentation you need to present to the authorities.

I think that we have our own certification processes in our country. I expect it to be mostly paperwork. We ensured some standard safety measures like galvanic isolation between human and potentially high voltage. But how it’ll go, I don’t know yet. It’s still lot of work for a complete device, especially with chip shortages.

Even as a class I device (which an ekg is emphatically never going to be), the ISO audit is three months between the first two stages alone. Under MDD 3 months is a push, but under MDR I think 6 is a much more realistic minimum (if you're starting from literal zero).

What kind of addon you making? WoW addons were what got me started coding ~10 years ago, after several false starts and burnouts in the quicksand of Dreamweaver and the like.

All hail Pylus the creator of GHI, and his custom scripting environment :)

Please take care of your future self and try to get proper sleep every night. Sleep is so important.

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