Development of an Algorithm for Heart Rate Measurement Using a Mobile Phone Camera

Abstract

Nowadays there exist many different ways to measure a person’s heart rate. One of them assumes the usage of a mobile phone built-in camera. This method is easy to use and does not require any additional skills or special devices for heart rate measurement. It requires only a mobile cellphone with a built-in camera and a flash. The main idea of the method is to detect changes in finger skin color that occur due to blood pulsation. The measurement process is simple: the user covers the camera lens with a finger and the application on the mobile phone starts catching and analyzing frames from the camera. Heart rate can be calculated by analyzing average red component values of frames taken by the mobile cellphone camera that contain images of an area of the skin.In this paper the authors review the existing algorithms for heart rate measurement with the help of a mobile phone camera and propose their own algorithm which is more efficient than the reviewed algorithms.

Keywords

• mhealth
• pulse detection
• heart rate
• mobile phone
• camera