Non-invasive heart rate measuring smartphone applications using on-board cameras: A short survey

The rapid improvement in smartphone technology has produced many medical applications 1. Cellular phones now offer several advantages over desktop or laptop computers in tele-monitoring applications like individual's fitness, instant diagnosing and systems for monitoring an individual's medical conditions. Heart rate is one of the most important vital signs of human body. Although cellular phones in combination with other sensing devices (like ECG meters) are able to capture heart rates, there exist a myriad of applications that use only smart phone and its associated accessories (such as on-board camera) to detect heart rates within acceptable accuracy limit. Theoretically, any body part can be used to measure heart rate, although fingertips are commonly used. The fundamental technique of measuring heart rate through smartphone applications is based on image or video processing. In this short survey, we discuss the basic mechanism of heart rate measurement using only smartphone cameras and compare the performance of some notable state-of-the-art smartphone applications available for such purpose. Our experiments show that most of the applications are able to capture heart rate with acceptable accuracy under various body conditions such as normal and waking up after sleep.