Design and Development of a Mobile Application: Blood Analysis

Abstract

The rapid growth of smart phone technology with sensors has enabled physiological measurements, which can simplify self assessments, medical diagnosis and environmental monitoring etc. Smart phone today offers significant advantages over traditional platforms in terms of test speed, control, low cost, ease-of-operation, and data management, and requires minimal equipment and user involvement. This study investigates the feasibility of extracting heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiration rate, blood pressure using a cell phone camera in a non invasive way, without the need of external sensors which is independent of ambient lighting condition. The method works by placing people finger over the smart phone camera and computing the quantity of light absorbed by the finger tissue. The smart phone thus acquires the Photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal. From heart pulse, oxygen saturation, respiration rate, blood pressure are estimated by using a peak detection algorithm in order to find the local maxima of the PPG signal and computing the time difference between peaks. I have compared the accuracy of heart pulse, oxygen saturation, respiration rate, blood pressure estimated by our method with a camera sensor over three different controlled experimental conditions. The fast fourier transform (FFT) plots showed a clear frequency. This is a mobile application is being developed in order to measure and computed heart rate, blood pressure, all vital signs, respiration rate and oxygen saturation by doing image processing of blood cells.