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Google's Pixels will read your heart rate and respiratory rate with their cameras

Feb 22,2024
2 min read
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Google is including heart and respiratory rate monitors to the Fit app on Pixel phones this month, and it plans to add them to other Android phones in the future. Both features depend on the smartphone camera: it measures respiratory rate by monitoring the rise and fall of a user’s chest, and heart rate via tracking shade change as blood strikes through the fingertip.

The features are only intended to let users track overall wellness and cannot evaluate or diagnose medical conditions, the company said.

This works by using tracking color change as blood strikes through your fingertip. On the other hand, measuring your respiratory rate works with the selfie camera, the place you position your self within a body and then just breathe.The software will monitor the rise and fall of your chest and infer the rate from there. A Google Health product manager explains that doctors count number a patient's respiratory rate in the identical way, and the company's machine learning technique employed right here is trying to emulate that.

According to Google's internal studies, the respiratory rate feature is accurate within one breath per minute, for people both with and without health conditions. The heart rate readings were accurate within 2%. The features were tested on people with a range of skin tones, and had similar accuracy.

The team will study how well the features work on other phones before making them available outside of the Pixel.