Pshko Mohammed Amin MSc Dissertation 2015/16

Capturing Your Heart Rate Using a Smartphone

Supervised by M.Villa-Uriol

Abstract

Heart rate (HR) can be defined as a total of time an individual’s heart beats, usually measured in beats per minute (BPM). In life, it is crucial for everyone to monitor his or her heart rate to know their health status.

Nowadays, smartphones can play an important role in monitoring our health. Disease prevention is important and being readily able to check the status of key health parameters can help promote well-being. These parameters include blood pressure, breathing rate, and heart rate. The development of digital technologies provides useful tools to monitor heart rate, and they are widely used by hospital medical staff and scientists. Moreover, a device like the Polar H7 heart rate sensor is remarkable and may play a significant role in monitoring an individual’s heart rate. Nowadays, smartphones have almost become a necessity in our daily lives. We not only use them for communication purposes but also take advantage of other facilities, such as capturing pictures, storing information and recording videos. Moreover, smartphone-based healthcare is a very popular topic, and there have been some investigations into the opportunities presented by smartphones. The goal of this project is to capture the heart rate through a smartphone's camera. In this work, by placing a finger on the phone's camera, reflective photoplethysmography (PPG) captures the heart rate of users.

The running environment used to implement this application is iOS, iPhone's operating system and the programming language is Objective-C. Finally, an iOS app has been developed by these requirements and the obtained results have been contrasted with the Polar H7 heart rate sensor to assess its accuracy.