You can check a person’s vital signs—pulse, respiration, and blood pressure—manually or by attaching sensors to the body. But a student in the Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Health and Sciences Technology program is working on a system that could measure these health indicators just by putting a person in front of a low-cost camera such as a laptop computer’s built-in webcam.

So far, graduate student Ming-Zher Poh has demonstrated that the system can indeed extract accurate pulse measurements from ordinary low-resolution webcam imagery. Now he’s working on extending the capabilities so it can measure respiration and blood-oxygen levels. He hopes eventually to be able to monitor blood pressure as well. Initial results of his work, carried out with the help of media lab student Daniel McDuff and professor of media arts and sciences Rosalind Picard, were published in the Optics Express journal in May 2010.

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