Coming soon via Harvard/MIT Health Sciences and Technology: Your vital signs, on camera

You can check a person’s vital signs — pulse, respiration and blood pressure — manually or by attaching sensors to the body. But a student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program is working on a system that could measure these health indicators just by putting a person in front of a low-cost camera such as a laptop computer’s built-in webcam.

via web.mit.edu

I found this through ACM TechNews. The technology's in a pretty raw state at this point, but it points to one facet of where we're likely to be 3-5 years down the road. Here's a YouTube video in which the inventor describes it in a nutshell. There's a link in the lower right, only barely visible, which will open the video in YouTube itself. If you slide your mouse cursor down there, you'll get hover text ("Watch on YouTube") when you're over the link.

 

Comments

[luanne]

Hello, I am actually a nurse and find this very interesting. I was wondering though how a camera can measure these vital signs and how accurate is it? Laser technology perhaps, but i'd like to know more! Thanks.