Harvard student created webcam based health monitoring system

I must say that such a system is not able to determine what you are sick there 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 the pulse, pressure and some other indicators. All this can be determined by using different types of sensors and medical equipment - but the system created by the student is contactless. She, for example, will be able to determine these indicators when you just look in the mirror. And it all costs very little - no more than a mid-level webcam (for example, one that is built into laptops).

A Harvard student named Ming-Zher Poh has already demonstrated the first working version of his device, based on a completely ordinary webcam. This system is able to 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 to be able to determine the pressure in the same non-contact way. Initial results of his work have already been published in the publication Optics Express.
')
The application of its development Ming sees useful in those cases when contact systems for determining some parameters of health either cannot be used at all or their use is not comfortable for the patient (for example, victims of an accident or newborns). In addition, such a system can be used in determining patient health parameters 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 the bathrooms - you look in the mirror, and the mirror “looks” at you, showing the results of your “inspection”. The most difficult, according to Ming, was overcoming any difficulties in the form of changes in light or moments when a person moves.

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

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

Experts who examined the system claim that it is fully functional and knows how to determine the pulse no less accurately than many medical devices that can be purchased now at the pharmacy. Well, it remains to wait for the student to be able to “finish” his system by adding the functions mentioned above. Then we can say that this is truly an invaluable development.



Via web.mit.edu