Smartphones have long passed the traditional use of making and receiving calls and text messages into providing useful clinical data for healthy living.
Smartphones can now use back cameras to monitor vital signs measuring heart rate, heart rhythm, respiratory rate, and blood oxygen level without using any peripheral device.
This feature benefits everyone, even those without basic medical knowledge, to monitor body signs. For instance, asthmatics could tell if the blood oxygen concentration is getting low while experiencing acute asthma exacerbation.
Another useful application is if a user is short of breath or having chest pain, the device could show if there is a high heart rate and decreased oxygen concentration.
The smartphone camera is integrated to work with an app created by the Chon and Worcester Polytechnic Institute research team – Yitzhak Mendelson (Associate professor of Biomedical Engineering), Domhnull Granquist-Fraser (Assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering), and Christopher Scully (Ph.D. student).
It works by pressing one’s fingertip to the lens of the phone’s camera, and as the camera’s light permeates the skin, it reflects off pulse in the blood; the application correlates shifts in blood colour with changes in the body’s vital signs with the aid of signal processing and algorithms development, a variety of signs is obtained from processed data gathered by the phone’s camera.
Smartphones come with medical benefits and are not just wearable devices. The smartphone is highly improvised in medical technology, integrating the Internet of Things to determine blood pressure easily in the shortest time, per the ISO standard.
Chon had previously designed a Holter heart monitor to track patients’ health using algorithms, and this new technology is an adapted system to augment health technology. A droid smartphone was used to test the feature, but the team stated that the new technology would easily be shared with other smartphones with video capacity.
As better blood pressure monitoring system is being designed outside the clinical environment stemming from the creativity of tech, effective prevention, and treatment of cardiovascular disease can be better. While it is salubrious, does it in any way threaten the professionalism of medical practitioners?
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Photo by liuzishan
