Regular is slightly irregular, at least when it comes to heart rates.

A group of University of North Florida students knows that better than most.

Three UNF electrical engineering students have spent the past semester toiling over a prototype wristwatch capable of monitoring every beat of a patient's heart and alerting paramedics in case of emergency.

"It's a first-alert system for people with heart problems," said UNF junior and project leader John Gonzalez. "If your heart rate starts changing up a lot, the watch is there to alert you or call paramedics if you can't do it yourself."

The prototype is based on a patent by Boris Golosarsky, a New Hampshire-based internist. The students used his algorithms and modified a programmable watch to fit the patent, which calls for Bluetooth functionality that allows users to sync their cell phone to make emergency calls or send text messages to chosen physicians in case of heart-rate turbulence.

There are dozens of watches on the market that monitor pulse and heart rates, but relatively few that analyze heart-rate variability, Gonzalez said.

The average person's heart rhythm is slightly irregular, so watches that track beats per minute can be misleading for patients with chronic heart issues. Golosarsky's patent focuses on the variability of the heart's rhythm because prolonged increases or decreases in pulse are the main warning signs leading to cardiac arrest.

The main selling point is the built-in Bluetooth, a feature lacking in any of the other mass-produced watches, Gonzalez said.

The product is part of the college's Connect Program, an emerging internship-like process that pairs students with industry professionals.

The students' professor, Il-Seop Shin, has been advising them throughout the design process. A visiting faculty member from the University of Massachusetts, Shin said the Connect Program places the students in the role of a concept development team working on contract as part of their lab class.

The patent holder retains the rights to the prototype, and the students aren't paid. But Shin said the product development experience is reward enough.

"It's going to look good on their resumes, that's for sure," he said. "Most of them are upper-level students preparing to enter the job force. When they go out for jobs, this experience will pay off. How many job candidates can say they worked in college on a real prototype for an item that could be mass produced?"

Another recent Connect project involved UNF students developing a low-cost, election debate timer for The People's Tea Party.

The watch's implications, however, are more preventive than political.

Senior Evan Stanley said he jumped at the chance to spend his lab time on a project with beneficial real-world applications.

"It's not that big of a deal that we're not making money off this, at least to me," Stanley said. "This watch could help some people later on down the road. That's big if something I worked on could help keep someone alive."

The project wraps in a few weeks at the end of the semester, but there's still work to be done.

They've been simulating heartbeats using a microprocessor board, and they haven't had a live research subject yet. They hope that will change in the next week because they're working on syncing a chest strap transmitter to the watch's receiver.

As for the watch, it's far from fashionable. The closest style comparison would be a calculator watch from the '80s.

Senior Kevin Nguyen, the programming brains behind the operation, said that's out of necessity. They're on a very limited budget - only a couple of hundred dollars - so they had to choose an easily programmable watch in their price range.

Nguyen spent time stripping out all the stock features from the watch and kept only the basics. That includes a pulse rate monitor signified by a blinking heart icon and not much else.

"This is designed mainly for one purpose, and we wanted it to be easy to read," Nguyen. "We don't want a bunch of unnecessary things to slow down the response time or get in the way of the alarm."

The last step is the final presentation to Golosarsky. The UNF team has been in constant e-mail communication with the internist, and he said he's willing to fly down to Florida to see the prototype in action.

"That's the big finale," Gonzalez said. "If he likes it, he could end up mass producing it. Who knows, he could give us all jobs working on it. That'd be nice.", (904) 359-4654