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Hernandez, J., McDuff, D., and Picard, R. "BioPhone: Physiology Monitoring from Peripheral Smartphone Motions" In Proc. International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), Milan, Italy, August 2015. OPEN FINALIST OF BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD
The large-scale adoption of smartphones during recent years has created many opportunities to improve health monitoring and care delivery. In this work, we demonstrate that motion sensors available in off-the-shelf smartphones can capture physiological parameters of a person during stationary postures, even while being carried in a bag or a pocket. In particular, we develop methods to extract heart and breathing rates from accelerometer data and compare them with measurements obtained with FDA-cleared sensors. We evaluated their accuracy on 12 people across different still body postures (pre- and post- exercise) and were able to reach mean absolute errors of 1.16 beats per minute (STD: 3) and 0.26 breaths per minute (STD: 0.5) when considering different conditions. Furthermore, we evaluated the same methods during regular phone activities, such as when watching a video or listening to a conversation, yielding increased but still comparable error rates for some conditions.