Google is introducing new features on its health and wellness app Google Fit that will allow users to measure their heart rate and respiratory rate using just their smartphone’s camera.
“These features will be available in the Google Fit app for Pixel phones, with plans to expand to more Android devices,” Google said.
In order to measure their respiratory rate, users need to place their head and upper torso in view of their phone’s front-facing camera and breathe normally. To measure your heart rate, they need to place their finger on the rear-facing camera lens.
“While these measurements aren’t meant for medical diagnosis or to evaluate medical conditions, we hope they can be useful for people using the Google Fit app to track and improve day-to-day wellness,” Google said in a blog post.
Users can choose to save their measurements to the app and monitor the same alongside other health and wellness information.
“Thanks to increasingly powerful sensors and advances in computer vision, these features let you use your smartphone’s camera to track tiny physical signals at the pixel level — like chest movements to measure your respiratory rate and subtle changes in the color of your fingers for your heart rate,” explained Google.
“We developed both features — and completed initial clinical studies to validate them — so they work in a variety of real-world conditions and for as many people as possible,” it said.
The app’s heart rate algorithm for instance, relies on approximating blood flow from colour changes in someone’s fingertip. Thus, it has to account for factors such as lighting, skin tone, age and more in order to work for everyone.