And then came the problems...

So we've been troubleshooting. Try as we might to get our sensor to give us strong, steady heart rate readings, its keeps having random spats of sporadic beats. (Because I doubt our heart rates just went from 78 to 659 beats per minute.)

So I looked at the serial monitor for arduino and discovered something.

It seems to work fine in arduino, as seen above. But as soon as I boot up processing, you can see what happens below:

And then randomly sometimes the visualization at least APPEARS to be steady...appears being the key word in that sentence.