Oxehealth is turning security cameras into health monitors

Even from across the room
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What if you could monitor your health without wearing any device at all? That's the pitch from Oxehealth, a startup that wants to turn cameras into tools for tracking our vital signs.

Oxehealth's technique uses cameras to detect the location of a person and then extract health information, according to TechCrunch, using a combination of computer vision, signal processing and machine learning.

Vital signs such as heart rate and breathing rate can be analysed, and the big thing here is that it can be done on any video camera with a reasonably capable chipset, which is why Oxehealth is looking to be a software-only company.

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Oxehealth plans to extend its tracking to more health indicators, so that its technology can also monitor blood oxygenation, temperature and blood pressure, making it a pretty comprehensive health platform.

It may not necessarily be something you'd want to do in your home, but there are loads of potentially great applications here, such as keeping an eye on elderly people who live alone or monitoring hospital patients from afar.

Oxehealth showed a demo using a 2-megapixel camera at TechCrunch Disrupt London, demonstrating how many existing cameras will be able to adopt the software. It's competing against 14 other startups at the event in hope of a $50,000 prize.

Oxehealth is turning security cameras into health monitors




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Hugh Langley

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Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.

Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.

Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.

He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.


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