Smartphone-Based Photoplethysmogram Measurement

Smartphones have become one of the widest and often used devices that people bring almost every time and everywhere. Their computational capacities allow their application to many every-day tasks. One of them is health state monitoring. This chapter presents a smartphone-based photoplethysmogram (PPG) acquisition and pulse rate evaluation system. The proposal was designed for different smartphone models, equipped with a LED or not. Different cameras represent the same acquired information in different ways: changes may occur in color saturation, resolution, frame rate, etc. Therefore, several smartphones were used to define the common characteristics of the captured video, and establish proper criteria for PPG extraction. Moreover, the appropriate algorithms were proposed and validated to verify the correct device usage, the system calibration, the PPG and pulse rate evaluation. The experimental results have confirmed the correctness and suitability of the proposed method with respect to the medical pulse measurement instruments.