A new app could launch in 2025, which takes blood pressure readings from your smartphone's camera.
Aktiia, known for its continuous blood pressure monitoring wearable, has got certification for an app that can measure blood pressure using a smartphone camera using AI.
The measurement is taken in 90 seconds, by the user placing their finger over the light of the cameraphone camera. And Akttiia says that the app works without calibration with a cuff.
Last year we saw Valencell release a cuffless blood pressure monitor, which takes readings from the finger – but this goes further. We’ve seen previous applications of using the smartphone camera and flash for HRV measurement – but it would offer huge democratization for blood pressure tracking – and a significant breakthrough for the millions of hypertension sufferers out there.
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If it comes to market – could put the frighteners on the the likes of Apple, Huawei, and Samsung which are working on, or have already launched, blood pressure monitoring in a smartwatch.
Aktiia trained generative AI models on its own set of 11 billion data points generated from its wearable band which launched in 2021.
The app has already received a coveted CE mark in Europe, which paves the way for a release in 2025. Dr. Josep Solà, co-founder and CTO of Aktiia, who worked on the technology, told TechCrunch that the CE mark comes under the EU’s new Medical Device Regulation (MDR):
“It’s a new regulation for medical devices in Europe. You need to run clinical trials and you need to prove performances,” he said.
“When we released our first product, that allowed us to start compiling a lot of data. Now we have a massive dataset within the company’s 11 billion data points of annotated data that we could use to train this new AI. It went to a level of accuracy that we could pass all the regulations for CE marking.”
Wareable says:
We’ve been waiting for blood pressure to come to mainstream wearables to democratize access to tracking this critical health metric. Hypertension is regarded as one of the biggest health threats, and linked to scores of serious conditions – and millions of people suffer from it.
The Aktiia band represented a jump forward, but it’s a dedicated device competing for wrist space, fairly expensive, and also requires calibration with a cuff. And that limits its appeal.
The Aktiia app would leverage something everyone has – a smartphone. And that makes it more powerful than even having blood pressure tracking on ubiquitous smartwatches such as the Apple Watch.
But it still relies on users to take a reading. So there’s still a place for wearables in blood pressure management.