No need to buy an Oximeter, when you can get it for free! CarePlix Vital's new Smartphone app can monitor your blood oxygen level, pulse, and respiration rates in under 40 seconds.
With the world staggering under the COVID-19 pandemic since last year, oximeters, just like thermometers, have become an important item for households. However, with an increase in demand for these health devices, prices of pulse oximeters have been hiked by manufacturers and sellers. A good quality pulse oximeter can cost you around Rs 2,000.
How does it work?
To replace the traditional oximeter, a Kolkata-based health startup has developed a mobile app. The new app called CarePlix Vital's can monitor your blood oxygen level, pulse, and respiration rates. According to a report in BGR.in, all one needs to do to use the mobile app is:-
Place a finger on the smartphone's rear camera.
Flashlight of the camera will be able to calculate the oxygen saturation (SpO2), pulse and respiration rates by penetrating into the finger.
Wait for 40 seconds to get a more accurate result.
PPG technology
"People needed a pulse oximeter or similar wearables such as a smartwatch to get their vitals such as oxygen saturation and pulse rate. The underlying technology in all of this is photoplethysmography or PPG,"
Subhabrata Paul, Co-Founder CareNow Healthcare told The Indian Express.
"We are achieving this through our smartphone's rear camera and flashlight. If you see the wearables and oximeters have infrared light sensors in them but for the phone, we just have the flashlight. Once we cover the rear camera and flashlight with the finger and start the scan for around 40 seconds, we are doing nothing but calculating the difference of light intensity and based on the difference we plot the PPG graph. From the graph, the SpO2 and pulse rate is derived,"
the co-founder said.
It's Accuracy
Paul added,
"With the doctors in the hospital, the trials were mainly conducted in the OPD. Comparisons were made to test the accuracy and it was found that CarePlix Vital was 96 percent accurate with heart beats while 98 percent accuracy in case of oxygen saturation."
Idea behind it
Speaking about the idea behind CarePlix Vital's, co-founder Monosij Sengupta noted,
"the idea is rooted from the known fact of cardiovascular deaths in the country."
The clinical trial for the device was conducted earlier this year by the team in Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial Hospital Kolkata with 1200 individuals.
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