Pulse Sense

The project

Pulse Sense is a capstone project born from a simple question: can heart monitoring be made accessible, readable and continuous without requiring a premium connected watch? The answer took the shape of a full ecosystem — an IoT sensor, an API, and a mobile app — that turns a raw data stream into something actually useful day to day.

My role

Solo across the whole stack, I took the project from initial modelling to a usable build. On the server side, I designed the Symfony REST API, set up JWT auth and shaped the database around the health domain. On mobile, I built the React Native (Expo) app from wireframes to a testable release.

Technical decisions

• JWT over sessions — the app being mobile-first, a stateless token simplifies multi-device handling and offline mode.
• Strict sensor / API / UI separation — each layer can evolve independently; the sensor can be swapped without touching the rest.
• Validation at the API edge — health data tolerates nothing: malformed payloads are rejected before they ever reach storage.
• Local-first on mobile — every measurement is persisted on-device before sync so no data is ever lost on a flaky network.

Takeaways

Pulse Sense taught me to think of a product as a system rather than a sequence of screens. Data is only valuable if it arrives intact, on time, and surfaced at the right moment — which forces architectural choices from the very first line of code. It’s also the project that convinced me, for good, that React Native lets you ship fast without sacrificing perceived quality.