Tiago Bolaños
Biomedical engineer and maker in Lisbon. I build hardware and firmware for acquiring biosignals — and a lot of other things around fencing, home automation and embedded electronics.
I'm a researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações and a Biomedical Engineering student at Instituto Superior Técnico. My work is mostly functional prototyping: ECG, EMG and EOG sensor front-ends, wearable devices, and augmentative & alternative communication tools for people with ALS, through the HALO / Unbabel Labs project. I also contribute to ScientISST, an open hardware platform for biomedical engineering.
Outside the lab I've fenced épée on the Portuguese national team since 2016, and I coach and run the armory at Clube Atlântico de Esgrima — repairing blades, masks and scoring gear, and building electronics for training. The rest is a large Home Assistant install and a homelab that ties it together.
Selected projects
ESPHome desk control board
ongoingA six-key panel with a PIR sensor, buzzer and OLED, mounted under the desk. Custom PCB, printed keycaps, wired into Home Assistant.
A bench box for the armory — plug in a blade or a body wire, get a red or a green light. Built so a fault takes seconds to find instead of a whole evening.
AAC input devices for ALS
ongoingA family of prototypes — a brow headband, EOG glasses, and a finger-click keyboard — giving people with ALS a way to type or trigger actions when speech and hand control are gone.
A forearm-worn device that reads EMG and motion, classifies it on-device, and streams the result to a phone. Many iterations, three radios, one very patient enclosure design.
ECG phone case
shippedA smartphone case that measures a single-lead ECG through printed electrodes, built to test whether everyday objects can do opportunistic heart-health sensing.
Recent notes
Why there's finally something here, and what I plan to put on it.