Harvard student creates webcam based health monitoring system

I must say right away that such a system is not able to determine what you are sick with right now, or what happened to your stomach, which does not like the contents of the last meal. However, this system, created on the basis of a webcam, is quite capable of determining heart rate, pressure and some other indicators. All this can be determined by using various types of sensors and medical equipment - but the system created by the student is non-contact. She, for example, will be able to determine these indicators when you just look in the mirror. And all this costs very little - no more than a mid-level webcam (for example, such as are built into laptops).

A Harvard student named Ming-Zher Poh has already demonstrated the first working version of his device, based on a very ordinary webcam. This system can very accurately determine the heart rate, that is, the pulse. Now the author of the development adds functions for measuring respiration and oxygen levels in the blood. Ming-Zher Poh hopes that he can determine the pressure, all in the same non-contact way. Initial results of his work have already been published in Optics Express.

Ming sees the use of his development as useful in cases where contact systems for determining certain health parameters cannot be applied at all, or their use is not comfortable for the patient (for example, accident victims or newborns). In addition, such a system can be used in determining the health parameters of patients via the Internet. Such systems already exist and work - the most famous is Google Health.

After the development is completed, such systems can be placed in the mirrors of bathrooms - you look in the mirror, and the mirror “looks” at you, showing the results of its “inspection”. The most difficult, according to Ming, was overcoming all kinds of difficulties in the form of changes in lighting or when a person moves.

The system determines the pulse by measuring the brightness of the skin color, where the blood pressure in the blood vessels of the skin of the face plays an important role. It determines all this free software, reading and analyzing information from the image received by the camera. The colors of the picture are divided into red, green and blue, the brightness of each of them is analyzed separately, comparing with the database.

Unfortunately, I could not find information on how the system copes with racial differences in skin color, but probably the student was able to overcome this obstacle.

Experts who have studied the system, claim that it is fully functional, and is able to determine the pulse no less accurately than many medical devices that can be purchased now in the pharmacy. Well, it remains to wait until the student can “finish” his system by adding the functions mentioned above. Then it can be said that this is truly a priceless development.



Via web.mit.edu