Google Fit app will assess your heart rate, respiratory rate using mobile phones

Google announced that Google Fit app will now measure your heart rate and respiratory rate using a cell phone, starting next month. . The feature will be made available in Google Fit app for Pixel phones, the company announced in a blog post. The post also mentioned that the feature will be extended to more Android phones in the future.

In a blog post, Google’s Shwetak Patel, Director of Health Technologies at Google Health, wrote, the company will be relying on sensors which are already built into the smartphone such as the “microphone, camera and accelerometer” to track the new health parameters.

The features are only intended to let users track overall wellness and cannot evaluate or diagnose medical conditions, the company said.

Users can point the phone’s front-facing camera at their head and chest to measure respiratory rate (the number of breaths someone takes per minute) using the app.

Before launching the product for respiratory rate, Google has already completed initial clinical validation examining accuracy among healthy individuals as well as those with respiratory conditions that might impact measurement. Google is relying on its own customary algorithms to calculate the heart rate and respiratory rate. It also claims these will work “in a variety of real-world conditions and for as many people as possible.”

The process used to detect heart rate is called photoplethysmography (PPG), which usually is picked up using specialised sensors.