Google phones will soon use camera to track your heart rate
Google has announced that youâll soon be able to use Pixel cameras for more than photos and video. If youâre into fitness, Pixel phones will soon allow you to measure your heart and respiratory rate using nothing but the phoneâs cameras.
Using the feature should be pretty straightforward. Depending on what you want to measure, youâll need to use a front or a rear camera. To measure your breathing rate, youâll need to place your head and upper torso in view of your phoneâs front camera and breathe normally. The app will track the changes in your chest movement to calculate the breathing rate.
For measuring your pulse, youâll need to use a rear camera. Place your finger on the rear camera lens and the app will read your heart rate. Google writes that the heart rate algorithm ârelies on approximating blood flow from color changes in someoneâs fingertip.â This could make this approach a little tricky because weâre all different. Google explains that the app will need to âaccount for factors such as lighting, skin tone, age and more in order to work for everyone.â
Google plans to introduce the new feature next month and they will be available in the Google Fit app. For now, theyâre only limited to Pixel phones, but Google plans to expand to more Android devices.
I personally donât see much use for an approach like this. I find apps like Pedometer or Strava more useful, as they measure the distance and time I walk or cycle in real-time. But I am me and you are you, and I guess folks who are more into fitness could find a feature like this useful. If nothing else, itâs interesting to see that a camera can be used for something totally unrelated to photography.
[via Ars Technica]