MobiEye: turning your smartphones into a ubiquitous unobtrusive vital sign monitoring system

Abstract

Recent advances in mobile and wearable technologies have stimulated significantly growing demands for more affordable, user-friendly, pervasive healthcare solutions that can be adopted by the public to proactively manage their health conditions and alleviate the burdens of hospitalization. This study seeks to propose a personalized ubiquitous health monitoring system that can unobtrusively monitor individuals’ vital signs, anywhere at any time. The proposed MobiEye framework makes use of the regular camera available on any smartphones or tablets to record various most important physiological signals without the need for acquiring extra specialized medical devices or attaching any sensor to the body. Through recording the reflected light intensities corresponding to the subtle blood flow changes with blood volume pulses, the proposed technique accurately extracts blood volume pulses from the facial videos recorded in real-world scenarios with the designed protocol. Experiments show that the proposed system achieved $$96 \, \% \,$$ accuracy on average (with the standard deviations of $$\pm 1.2$$ ) for the heart rate estimation and higher correlations between the pulse transit time and the reference systolic blood pressure $$(mean \, r = 0.89,\, SE= 0.05)$$ .