Want to track your heart rate for fitness or health related purposes? You can choose to either get a heart rate monitor via a chest strap or a fitness tracker that comes with a built-in heart rate sensor. However what if you could instead use your phone to track your heart rate? This means that you won’t need to buy any new accessories, wouldn’t that be cool?
As it turns out, researchers at MIT have been working on such a device. Lead by Javier Hernandez, a research at MIT’s Media Lab, the project is dubbed BioPhone and basically the gist of it is that it uses your phone and its built-in sensors to help track your heart rate and breathing patterns, all the while it remains in your pocket or bag.
So how does this work, you ask? According to the researchers, this will rely on your smartphone’s accelerometer. The sensor will track small movements from your body that could be from a beating heart or your chest rising and falling while you inhale/exhale. When they put an early prototype to the test, they found that it wasn’t as accurate as they’d like it to be.
For example when compared to more traditional trackers, the BioPhone’s readings was off by about 1 beat per minute, and breathing rate estimations were also off by about a quarter of a breath per minute. While this might not seem big, we suppose long-term it would result in pretty inaccurate data.
However it does show promise, but there are some skeptics out there, such as Emil Jovanov, an associate professor at the University of Alabama who said, “Sensors are definitely much better quality than they used to be in the early days of smartphones. However, their quality is still not sufficient for sophisticated applications.” Regardless, it’s still an interesting avenue that could be worth exploring.