Google has rolled out a new feature in Google Fit — company’s health-tracking platform — that will allow smartphone users to measure their heart rate and respiratory rate using their phone’s camera.
According to the latest blog post from the internet search giant, this feature will first be rolled out to the Google Fit app for Pixel phones and will later come to more Android devices.
Describing how the process will work, Google said that users will be able to measure their respiratory rate by using their phone’s front-facing camera. “To measure your respiratory rate, you just need to place your head and upper torso in view of your phone’s front-facing camera and breathe normally,” said Google. As for the measurement of the heart rate, users will have to place their finger on the rear-facing camera lens.

“Thanks to increasingly powerful sensors and advances in computer vision, these features let you use your smartphone’s camera to track tiny physical signals at the pixel level — like chest movements to measure your respiratory rate and subtle changes in the colour of your fingers for your heart rate,” added Google.
The company claims that both features work in a variety of real-world conditions and for as many people as possible, but still these measurements should not be used for medical diagnosis or to evaluate medical conditions.