Xiaomi’s Health app can detect your heart rate using your phone’s camera and flash

Health apps have been in fashion for a long time thanks, among other things, to the devices connected to measure our constants. Bracelets, watches and other devices know how far we walk, how long we spend without moving and even our heart rate or the oxygen level of our blood. And all the data is fed into the health apps.

Xiaomi has been using Mi Fit for some time, although last year it already put into circulation a more general app, your Xiaomi Mi Health that we know simply as Xiaomi Salud or Salud in Spanish. Now the app has been updated, starting from China, and has gained quite an interesting functionality: heart rate measurement with phone camera.

Flash, camera, action

Typically, bracelets, watches, and other physical activity monitors register our blood pulse by laser. We can turn them and see that they emit light, usually green, with which they measure the movements of the skin caused by the bloodstream, thus being able to measure the pulsations.

Since we will not always have a bracelet or activity monitor at hand, Xiaomi Mi Health has released a new functionality that uses the camera of our mobile phone with the same purpose: to measure our pulse. The app itself explains that to perform this measurement uses the flash of our mobile as a source of continuous light, thus replacing the laser of the bracelets, and that records the changes thanks to the camera and a software that analyzes the captured image.

We will not have to support the phone against the wrist or anything similar but our finger will suffice so that the phone can collect the data and offer us what we want, the rhythm of our heartbeat. Once our heart rate has been measured, Xiaomi Mi Health will ask us to define our current status to record the data. If we are at rest or not, or if we have exercised or are at it. Something that is already done in Mi Health, although with a completely manual introduction. Now the camera will offer us a more precise data.

The functionality that will measure our pulse through the phone’s camera arrives on board version 2.7.4 of the Xiaomi Mi Health app and it will not take long to be available to every owner of a Xiaomi phone. Meanwhile we will continue to have to enter our pulse manually whenever we want to add a new record to our history. Unless we have a device connected to the phone, of course.

Via | XDA Developers

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The news

Xiaomi’s Health app can detect your heart rate using your phone’s camera and flash

was originally published in

Xataka Android

by
Samuel Fernandez

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