Heart rate measurement on Android platform

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology to measure a heart rate using photoplethysmogram (PPG) - a technique that uses infrared light to detect changes in the blood flow volume in tissues. We present a new application of the Android smartphone's camera equipped with LED flash which used for recording the intensity of light from the fingertip blood volume. The red channel of RGB signals in each picture frame recorded by smartphone returned the plethysmographic information. This contextual information will be converted into time domain signal by using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for further used in heart rate estimation process. The final results is the heart rate of each person recorded within 40 seconds. The experimental results conducted by 10 testers indicated that there is no obvious difference between heart rate measured by our system and by a digital pressure monitor with 0.57 percent discrepancy. © 2016 IEEE.