Pixel Phones Will Be Able To Read Your Heart Rate With Their Cameras (theverge.com) 28
Google is adding heart and respiratory rate monitors to the Fit app on Pixel phones this month, and it plans to add them to other Android phones in the future. Both features rely on the smartphone camera: it measures respiratory rate by monitoring the rise and fall of a user's chest, and heart rate by tracking color change as blood moves through the fingertip. From a report: The features are only intended to let users track overall wellness and cannot evaluate or diagnose medical conditions, the company said. To measure respiratory rate (the number of breaths someone takes per minute) using the app, users point the phone's front-facing camera at their head and chest. To measure heart rate, they place their finger over the rear-facing camera. A doctor counts a patient's respiratory rate by watching their chest rise and fall, and the Google feature mimics that procedure, said Jack Po, a product manager at Google Health, in a press briefing. "The machine learning technique that we leverage basically tries to emulate that," he said.
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> Most of the times I have had my respiratory rate measured it was a nurse doing it.
Most of the times I had my respiratory rate measured it was a small sensor on my finger doing it. The nurse just wrote the number into my chart.
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now i wonder (Score:1)
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what else these fancy schmancy smartphones can do that we dont know about,
A Coron-a-fon Psychiatrist!
The App will monitor your messages, call and other phone activity, and then decide if Corona has cursed you with mental illness.
Then it will order a white van with men with nets and straight jackets to come and scoop you up, and take you to the loony bin.
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Re:Missing a key part of the procedure (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who has taken a polygraph exam (I know polygraphs have lots of naysayers around here, and I'm not here to defend them, but I figured I'd share my experiences anyway), I can attest to this fact.
When someone tells you, "Okay, I just need for you to breathe normally", you suddenly start questioning everything about your breathing and whether or not it's normal, much the same as it's hard to stop thinking of a pink, polka-dotted elephant when someone tells you to not think about a pink elephant with polka dots. The person administering the test actually stopped the test before we had even begun so that they could tell me to stop thinking about my breathing. Apparently it was obvious I was trying to breathe normally, rather than just letting it happen naturally. They gave me a quick technique for putting my attention elsewhere and the rest of the test proceeded normally after that.
And in case anyone is curious, I passed the test with flying colors, which came as no surprise to me. I was able to answer everything honestly and without any hangups in the back of my head...which wasn't something the other guy who was taking the exam right after me could say. In talking with him afterwards, he said that he had lied about some past activity and was seemingly caught in his lie, since they had called him back in for an additional exam the following day. For my part, however, it was pretty straightforward. Contrary to what you see on TV—a lot of angry voices and "where were you on the night of the 27th?!"—in reality you calmly go over the questions in advance, they deliberately provide clarification on all terms so that they know that you know what they mean by the question, and you then work with them to edit the questions to eliminate any mental hangups you might have that they don't care about.
For my part, years of identifying edge cases in my work as a software developer meant that I practically bored my examiner to tears with all of the caveats and exceptions I asked them to carve out before I could answer the questions 100% honestly. E.g. "I know what you're trying to get at, but I can think of at least three times I've received bootleg copies of media instead of the legit ones I was trying to purchase, and I can't rule out that I've forgotten other instances of the same, nor can I rule out that I've never unknowingly done business with a front for a criminal organization, so can we change the question to 'to the best of your awareness, other than what has been disclosed here, have you ever knowingly supported criminals financially?'?". Fun times.
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Happy to oblige! It was an interesting experience, though not one I would be eager to repeat. My session lasted nearly four hours, which I later gathered was on the lengthy side for this particular sort of exam; apparently I was adding quite a few more caveats than the typical person.
It also wasn't particularly comfortable. You're sitting as still as you can to give them a clean reading, you're sitting upright because you've got a respiration monitor strapped to your chest, and your arm is going to sleep re
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My understanding was that they ask questions that everyone is uncomfortable answering truthfully in order to get an idea about the response patterns of general nervousness versus knowingly lying: "I'm speaking the truth but what if they don't believe me" versus "I took an apple ten years ago, but surely that doesn't count as stealing so I don't need to mention it".
Your way of handling those calibration questions did not necessarily help you. It could have led to them setting the threshold response for lying
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This wasn’t “my way” of handling anything. This was specifically what I was instructed to do. I may have had more caveats than most people, but it actually worked out well for me because it meant that I had no reason to be anything other than at ease during the questioning; every answer I gave was a yes or no that was 100% true. And my claim to have passed with flying colors is based on my later understanding that my results were apparently atypically good, so I stand by my actions.
Moreove
Not Me (Score:1)
Keep it simple: use the accelerometer (Score:2)
You should be able to measure both your heart and respiration rates by lying flat on your back and placing the phone on your chest. Data from the accelerometer will yield both rates, once it has been properly crunched.
Even cheap smart phones have accelerometers and should be able to use this method.
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Pixel phone reads your heart: (Score:3)
You really wanted and iPhone 12, but were too embarrassed to spend the money.
What will they do with our health data? (Score:1)
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Of course the only way to use this feature will be an app that stores data on the cloud and uses a facebook or google account for authentication. Why would it be any other way?
Old idea (Score:3)
I remember at least five years ago downloading an Android app that could measure my heart rate by placing my finger over the camera and LED flash bulb.
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Is this new? (Score:1)
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Your mind is weird, I'm pretty sure that they aren't talking about swimming.
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No one is talking about swimming.
Nice but (Score:2)
What about fever monitoring? That seems more important nowadays. Seems like a fun and social thing to do is to see if anyone around you has a fever. Well I'd wanna do that.
No thanks (Score:2)
Cause I can't tell by myself... --.-- (Score:2)
What kind of complete moron goes "Hmm, I wonder if my heart beats fast and I'm breathing quickly ... Let me check my phone!"??