Pixel phones can read your heartbeat with their cameras

Google is adding heart and breathing rate monitors to the Fit app on Pixel phones this month, and plans to add them to other Android phones in the future. Both features depend on the smartphone camera: it measures the breathing rate by monitoring the rise and fall of a user’s chest, and heart rate by detecting color change as blood moves through the fingertip.

The features are only intended to track users’ general well-being and cannot evaluate or diagnose medical conditions, the company said.

To measure the breathing speed (the number of breaths someone takes per minute) using the app, users point the phone’s front camera at their head and chest. To measure the heartbeat, they place their finger over the camera looking backwards.

Image: Google

A doctor counts a patient’s breathing rate by watching the breast rise and fall, and the Google version mimics the procedure, Jack Po, a product manager at Google Health, said in a press briefing. “The machine learning technique we use is basically trying to emulate it,” he said.

Google’s heart rate monitor is similar to a feature Samsung has included on a number of older Galaxy smartphones, including the Galaxy S10. The company removed the feature for the S10E, S20 and later phones.

Heart rate data from Google’s app will be less comprehensive than the types of readings someone can get from a portable device, which can constantly monitor something like heart rate as someone goes through their daily lives. But a home function that can check these metrics on demand is still a useful tool, Po said in the briefing. Anything that increases the number of measurements someone increases on their heart or breathing rate is important. Doctors, for example, usually only get a measurement every few months when someone comes into an office, he said.

“If users were to take their heartbeat once a week, they would actually get a lot of value,” Po said. “They will get a lot of value to see if their heart rate can improve if the exercise pays off.”

GIF: Google

Google has chosen to incorporate these features into the smartphone to make it accessible to most people, Po said. “A lot of people, especially currently in backward economic classes, don’t have things like portable items, but will still benefit from the ability to track their breathing rate, heart rate, and so on.”

Internal studies on Pixel phones showed that the breathing rate within one breath per minute was accurate, both for people with and without health conditions, said Jiening Zhan, a technical leader at Google Health, during the press briefing. The heart rate function was within 2 percent accurate. The feature has been tested in people with a variety of skin tones, and it has a similar accuracy for light and dark skin, she said. The team plans to publish a scientific paper with the data from its evaluations.

The team will study how well the features work on other phones before making them available outside the Pixel. “We want to make sure you know that the careful testing is being done before it is introduced to other devices,” Zhan said.

At present, the functions are described as tools that can be used for general well-being. Google does not claim that they can perform a medical function. Therefore, it is not necessary for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to add it to the app.

Eventually, they can take the app on that path, Po indicated. The tests done on the features show that it is consistent with clinical products, he said. This is therefore a possibility in the future. “Honestly, we haven’t tried and tested enough to say that it can definitely still work for those use cases, but it’s definitely something we’re investigating,” Po said.