Innovative Android/iPhone app uses camera and flash to check your heart rate

Looks like an interesting application, BUT: it wants full network access. Why does this application need network access? We really need to start asking questions like that...

Cool! I remember building one of these in school, except we used Matlab and an infrared emitting led and an infrared detector.

I've not used this app but this is definitely possible and has been covered in the literature. The final link is to a paper presented recently which actually proposes using a mobile phone for this.<p>Would be interesting to see what other information can be extracted from optical signals. Tricorders can't be that far off now.<p><a href="http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-18-10-10762" rel="nofollow">http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-18-10-1076...</a><p><a href="http://vassilios-chouliaras.com/pubs/c51.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://vassilios-chouliaras.com/pubs/c51.pdf</a><p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717852/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717852/</a><p><a href="https://embs.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/abstract.pl?ConfID=11&#38;Number=1251" rel="nofollow">https://embs.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/abstract.pl?C...</a>

This is a neat idea and one I was both surprised and excited to find in the app store when I was looking for such a thing. Sadly it fails in implementation, it just doesn't work terribly well, I almost wonder if they are just faking it and have some heavy bias to report 80 bpm, since that's believe for most.<p>But in my experience at least, when you compare it to a real heart rate monitor, it is always quite off.

Bought it, was skeptical. However, it seems to perform as advertised. Compared with a manual beat check and it was only off by a couple.

Seems to be the same tech as Nintendo's Wii Vitality sensor, according to this summary of the patent:<p><a href="http://www.siliconera.com/2010/10/07/nintendo-patent-shows-wii-vitality-sensor-game-example/" rel="nofollow">http://www.siliconera.com/2010/10/07/nintendo-patent-shows-w...</a>

It would be cool if someone with a real heart rate meter could run some tests to see how accurate this is. For what it's worth, I couldn't get it to work. The values fluctuated between 50-150 and refused to settle on any value.

If they're doing this correctly they could also tell you your blood oxygen level. Blood Ox would be much more useful to a larger range of people.

Does this really work? I wonder if it works with equal accuracy for people of different color or skin types.