Does a mobile-phone based PPG application accurately detect Diabetes Mellitus?
A low-cost, smartphone-based PPG application demonstrates feasibility for non-invasive detection of Diabetes Mellitus with moderate sensitivity and specificity.
The alarming statistics of Diabetes Mellitus (DM) Type 2 as the most common and prevalent disease in India and world over 1 has fuelled research in the direction of non-invasive and continuous monitoring of this disease. This paper describes a demonstration of an inexpensive mobile-phone based android application which can collect Photoplethysmogram (PPG) from fingertip via built-in camera and flash and transfer it to a high-end cloud server for early detection of DM. Additionally, this application allows continuous monitoring of DM patients can aid in assisting the short and long-term complication risks. The proposed application is targeted to cater to the inherent demand to for a mobile-based, pervasive system for continuous, non-invasive monitoring and detection of DM. Our application has been successfully deployed on Nexus 5 and tested on controlled and diabetic group with 80% specificity and 84% sensitivity for a 100 patient dataset and presented in this paper.
Reddy et al. (Wed,) studied this question.