Doctors Can Correctly Measure Blood Pressure, Just By Looking At Your Selfie Face Video

For years now, we've heard the moniker that there's an app for everything, all you need is a smartphone to try it out.

Soon that's going to extend to the area of your health and preventative care like never before, even to the extent of reading your blood pressure correctly by just looking at your face video.

Ontario Institute

What seems science fiction is actually very much from the realm of science reality, as researchers have successfully demonstrated detecting someone's blood pressure without any traditional apparatus.

The technology that makes this possible -- to measure someone's blood pressure just by looking at their face -- is called as transdermal optical imaging (TOI) technology.

"From the video captured by the technology, you can see how the blood flows in different parts of the face and through this ebb and flow of blood in the face, you can get a lot of information," says Kang Lee, Professor, Applied Psychology and Human Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Canada Research Chair in developmental neuroscience, who's also the lead author of the study.

Selfie video for blood pressure measurement

Kang Lee and his postdoctoral researcher Paul Zheng used transdermal optical imaging to measure blood pressure of 1,328 Canadian and Chinese adults. They did by analyzing 2-minute videos of their face on an iPhone running their experimental app.

Reuters

When they compared results of their findings with each of the subject's measured blood pressure using standard devices, researchers found their blood pressure readings were 95 to 96 per cent accurate.

Prof Lee argues that blood pressure is one of the most vital indicators of our health, and can indicate the onset of major issues such as heart attack and stroke. With easy, smartphone-based access to one's blood pressure reading can be a huge help for staying healthy, and a clear indicator of the future of smartphone-based healthcare.