Camera Heart Rate Variability app for iPhone and iPad
Developer: Marco Altini
First release : 12 Jan 2014
App size: 23.62 Mb
Camera Heart Rate Variability is the first app that lets you record, plot and export time and frequency domain Heart Rate Variability Features - without requiring any heart rate monitor.
Camera HRV uses a technique called photoplethysmography (PPG for short), which consists in detecting changes in blood volume during a cardiac cycle, by illuminating the skin and measuring changes in light absorption. PPG has become quite a popular non-invasive method for extracting physiological measurements such as heart rate and oxygen saturation. However, most applications today focus simply on heart rate or respiration rate.
Supported devices for the camera measurement: iPhones 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 6+, 6S+, SE, 7, 7+, 8, 8+, X, XS, XS Max, XR, 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max, 12 mini, 12, 12 Pro, 12 Pro Max, 13 mini, 13, 13 Pro, 13 Pro Max
Camera HRV can assess cardiac autonomic regulation through quantification of sinus rhythm variability. Since HRV aims at quantifying autonomic regulations, it can be used as marker of sympathetic or parasympathetic predominance, and therefore become relevant in many applications. In athletes for example heavy training is responsible for shifting the cardiac autonomic balance toward a predominance of the sympathetic over the parasympathetic drive, and HRV analysis attempts to quantify this shift.
Other applications span from stress monitoring, assessment of pathological conditions and even emotional regulation during financial decision-making.
Main Features:
- extracts, plots, stores and exports heart rate, rr-intervals, time and frequency domain heart rate variability features (AVNN, SDNN, rMSSD, pNN50, LF, HF, LF/HF)
- configurable time window for feature extraction (30 seconds to 5 minutes)
- automatic RR-interval correction
- event annotation
- comparison between up to 3 recordings lets you get a better understanding of autonomic regulation and sympathetic/parasympathetic activity under different contexts in a glance
- data export/storage on iTunes and Dropbox (csv format, exports heart rates, rr intervals, events and computed features). Data export needs to be performed from the history -> recording view, by clicking on the export button (bottom left).
- integration with the Health app (writes Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability)
Find out more at this link: http://www.marcoaltini.com/2/post/2014/01/heart-rate-variability-using-the-phones-camera.html
Latest reviews of Camera Heart Rate Variability app for iPhone and iPad
The Interface ist pretty, yet designed for scientists, with an additional diploma to be able to run this App. I could not make use of this App and am trying out "breathcoherence+". May be, thatll work...
I was interested in measuring my HRV to track my recovery and this app was not expensive, and didnt require any equipment. It doesnt work at all! It displays double whatever my heart rate is at the time, and doesnt want to record most of the time. When it does record, there is nothing in the other tabs; most importantly, it doesnt calculate my HRV which is why I bought it in the first place. I tried so many times, an even kept my finger on the camera for 2 minutes. Anyway, hopefully I have prevented anyone else from buying the app.
Im very sorry to say this app is very inaccurate and inconsistent. I work with a team physiologist in my training and weve been testing this for ease of use compared to chest strap and watch monitoring but its not accurate and not worth the money. If I was consistent then it would still work but one test gave me a measurement of 102 and seconds later the test gave me a 51, ridiculous. So disappointed
I am a cardiologist exploring new ways to use smartphone as a diagnostic tool. This app is one of the best example of “iPhone as diagnostic tool” I have found. The design of this software is more sophisticated than other heart rate devices in the app store. The smoothing algorithm with cubic spline method is ingenious. The programmer validated his HRV measurement with validated clinical instrument and this enhanced the trustworthiness of his method. One small piece of advice: Bland-Altman plot and paired t-test should be used to compare the camera HRV with the clinical gold standard measurement. Overall, I am really impressed by its sophistication. I wish you good luck in your future project.
Logging to Dropbox does not work for me. Bummed.