Google can measure your heart rate
Today the message came that Google can measure your heart rate with your smartphone camera.
We all want to live healthier lives. By exercising more, eating better and drinking less beer. Well, maybe not the latter, but it is still useful to be able to measure your heart and breathing in a simple way. Google uses a combination of sensors and computer vision algorithms to perform measurements with your smartphone camera.
Available on Pixel phones
The company said that Google’s heart rate monitoring feature will be available on all Pixel phones from next month, but more Android devices will follow soon. To use this you have to place your head and upper body in view of the front camera. By placing a finger on the rear-facing lens, your heart rate can be estimated. The results can be saved in the Google Fit app to track this in the future and see if there are any changes. In other words: do you live healthier or not? Incidentally, you can choose not to save the data in the app, so that you can be sure that no one can access it. It is also possible to delete the measurements within the app.
Health Technologies Department
Google even has a health technologies division at Google Health. The boss there is called Shwetak Patel and compares this function to the fingertip pulse oximeter. A difficult word, but this is the device that you put on the tip of your finger, so that the heart rate can be measured. Due to the developments of smartphone cameras and computer vision algorithms, it is now possible to see the most imperceptible movements and thus color changes. So if you look at the face and there is a little change of color, that can be seen and apparently tell what your heart rate is. A view of the upper body is required to measure the respiration.
The algorithms have been tested on people of a wide range of ages, genders, skin colors, health images and under different lighting conditions
Patel
Of course, this tool is not for medical use but is designed for personal well-being. They are not medical diagnoses, but still useful measures of fitness and health, according to Google. So after your run, just before 9:00 PM if you have to be in for curfew, you can quickly use the app and see what your heart rate is. And then hope it is better than last time.
