A Novel Heart Rate Monitoring Method using a Smartphone

Abstract

Accurate heart rate detection is important in healthcare and exercise monitoring. Recently, heart rate monitoring using a smartphone has been highlighted due to its convenience and accuracy. In this paper, we hypothesize that our smartphone-based heart rate detection algorithm reliably detects heart rate based on fingertip image changes. Here, we have used successive video camera fingertip images with edge detection and smoothing techniques to process the fingertip images and to find out the heart rate of the subject. To investigate the capability of our proposed algorithm, we recruited 3 subjects and collected 2-min video data from each subject. We evaluated the performance of our proposed method by comparing it to the previous average intensity-based method [1]. Test results show that our proposed and previous methods give similar heart rate detection performance.