It’s increasingly common for smartphones to collate a huge amount of data about our behavior, with analysis of this data providing an increasing level of insight into our past, present and even future.

One of the more interesting projects is the BioPhone, which is an MIT led project that uses the accelerometer in our phone to track things such as our pulse and breathing rate.

Portable health monitors

The project, which was documented in a recent paper, aims to utilize mobile phones to measure things like our heart rate and breathing rate in a slightly less obtrusive manner than traditional tools.

“While great strides have been made to provide comfortable physiological monitoring, traditional methods still require attaching electrodes to the skin and/or interrupt daily activities,” the team say.

Mobile devices offer a better way of doing things, both for the user and healthcare professionals.  All devices come ready made with a range of tools that can be repurposed for the task of monitoring our health.

“Motion sensors embedded in head-mounted and wrist-worn wearable devices such as Google Glass and Galaxy Gear can capture heart and breathing rates accurately. While the results were very promising, not everybody uses these types of wearable devices as they may be cumbersome and stigmatizing,” they say.

By using built in sensors, the team believe that the phone can be doing its work even if not in contact with the user.  So it can be in your pocket or bag and still monitor your pulse.

It does this by automatically recovering the pulse and respiratory waveforms from which heart and breathing rates can be extracted.  The 3-axis accelerometer in a smartphone was used during the research to capture the physiological parameters of the user.

The team tested out their method against FDA approved devices that perform a similar role.  Participants were asked to use their phone in a range of ways, including standing up, sitting down and lying.

They were then asked to cycle on an exercise bike so that a before and after reading could be extracted.

“While the results are very promising there are still several research challenges that need to be addressed in order to provide continuous physiological measurement,” the team say.

Now, it should be said that this is still an approach that requires more work before it’s ready for more widespread roll out.  The MIT team, and others working on similar approaches, will need to work out how to reliably measure things like heart and breathing rates.

“As these methods continue to advance, we hope they will be used to create passive and comfortable assessments that foster greater health and wellbeing during daily life,” the team conclude.

It will certainly be an interesting trend to follow.