Selfies Can Now Measure Health Stats Like Heart Rate and Blood Pressure
An app says it will be able to measure a person’s heart rate, blood pressure, stress, depression, and blood sugar levels with just a selfie.
Nuralogix’s health and wellness app Anura says it will soon be able to take a 30-second selfie of an individual and use artificial intelligence (AI) to give over 1,000 diagnostics about the state of their health.
Anura showcased the selfie-based health monitoring platform at the Consumer Technology Association (CES) event in Las Vegas last week.
TechCrunch reports that Anura can use the data from a short video selfie to create a catalog of readings about the person.
These include vital stats like heart rate and blood pressure as well as estimating mental health-related diagnostics like stress and depression levels.
A 30-second selfie can also provide details about an individual’s physical state like body mass index and skin age.
The video image can also measure their level of risk for conditions like hypertension, stroke, cardiovascular, and heart disease as well as biomarkers like their blood sugar levels.
Anura can also use the data from the video selfie to flag irregular heartbeat or breathing patterns, and even flag body mass index (BMI) issues.
Translucent Skin
NuraLogix developed Anura using AI technology that was trained on data from some 35,000 different users.
Anura analyzes a 30-second video image of a user’s face captured on a conventional smartphone camera to see how blood moves around it.
“Human skin is translucent,” NuraLogix tells TechCrunch.
“Light and its respective wavelengths are reflected at different layers below the skin and can be used to reveal blood flow information in the human face.”
That is then correlated with different diagnostics from those people using traditional measuring tools and uploaded to the company’s “DeepAffex” Affective AI engine.
The Anura app then effectively “reads” the person’s selfie based on what the AI has been trained to see in their face.
The direction of blood flow in a subject’s face or an individual’s skin color can reveal several factors about their physiological and psychological state.
As an individual’s physiological state changes the blood flow in their face changes as well so the camera picks up on these changes in the video selfie.
However, NuraLogix states that “Anura is not a substitute for the clinical judgment of a health care professional [and] does not diagnose, treat, mitigate or prevent any disease, symptom, disorder or abnormal physical state.”
Image credits: Header photo sourced from NuraLogix.
