HemaApp: Noninvasive Blood Screening of Hemoglobin Using Smartphone Cameras

Edward Wang, William Li, Doug Hawkins, Terry Gernsheimer, Colette Norby-Slycord, Shwetak Patel

HemaApp uses the smartphone camera with an array of visible to IR light to measure hemoglobin levels

Abstract

We present HemaApp, a smartphone application that noninvasively monitors blood hemoglobin concentration using the smartphone's camera and various lighting sources. Hemoglobin measurement is a standard clinical tool commonly used for screening anemia and assessing a patient's response to iron supplement treatments. Given a light source shining through a patient's finger, we perform a chromatic analysis, analyzing the color of their blood to estimate hemoglobin level. We evaluate HemaApp on 31 patients ranging from 6 -- 77 years of age, yielding a 0.82 rank order correlation with the gold standard blood test. In screening for anemia, HemaApp achieve a sensitivity and precision of 85.7% and 76.5%. Both the regression and classification performance compares favorably with our control, an FDA-approved noninvasive hemoglobin measurement device. We also evaluate and discuss the effect of using different kinds of lighting sources.