Finger Blood Flow Monitoring Using Smart Phones

The use of smart phones in healthcare applications is growing steadily. The inbuilt sensors are used to estimate the value of physiological data from human body. With progressive innovation, smart phone based medical applications will continue to be developed at an exponential rate. In this paper, we show that a smart phone can be used to monitor the blood flow in finger, based on the pulse height obtained from the fingertips. This is achieved by using the camera lens and the flash light of the smart phone. The height of the pulse rises along with the surrounding temperature indicating that the blood flow increases when the temperature becomes warmer. This study shows that there is a potential to monitor regulation of body temperature using smart phone.