Up to 70% of blood oxygen can be measured at home using a smartphone’s flash

Researchers from the US have discovered that cell phones can detect blood oxygen saturation levels as low as 70%, which is the minimum amount that a pulse oximeter should be able to monitor.

Camera Flash Measures Oxygen in Blood

Participants in the proof-of-concept study from the University of Washington (UW) and the University of California San Diego placed their fingers above the smartphone’s camera and flash, which utilizes a deep-learning algorithm to determine blood oxygen levels.

The smartphone correctly identified if a participant had low blood oxygen levels 80% of the time when the team administered a regulated mixture of nitrogen and oxygen to six subjects to artificially lower their blood oxygen levels.

Co-lead author Jason Hoffman from the University of Washington said that other smartphone applications that do similar functions were created by instructing users to hold their breath. However, after a minute or so, people start to feel quite uncomfortable and need to breathe, and that’s before their blood-oxygen levels have dropped enough to accurately represent the whole range of clinically important data.

Furthermore, he added that they can collect 15 minutes of data from each person using the test. According to the study, smartphones may operate effectively within the essential threshold range.

About the Other Benefits

Another advantage of using a smartphone to measure blood oxygen levels is that practically everyone owns one. Dr. Matthew Thompson, a co-author, and professor of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine explained how this would allow us to take repeated measures with our device for no cost or a minimal fee.

Instantly determining whether patients need to visit the emergency room or if they can stay at home and relax and schedule a later appointment with their regular care provider would be very helpful for telemedicine consultations.

Each participant was required to wear a regular pulse oximeter on one finger while also placing another finger on the same hand over a smartphone camera and flash to collect data for training and testing the algorithm.

The researchers trained a deep learning algorithm to determine the blood oxygen levels using participant data. The remaining information was utilized to confirm the method’s accuracy before testing it on brand-new individuals. The camera captures how much blood absorbs light from the flash in each of the three-color channels it measures: red, green, and blue, according to senior author Edward Wang, assistant professor at UC San Diego. By putting the system to the test on more people, the team aims to continue this research.

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