A team of researchers from the University of Washington have developed an app that turns smartphones into anemia detectors.
HemaApp is 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, the researchers perform a chromatic analysis, analyzing the color of their blood to estimate hemoglobin level. They 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 , an FDA-approved noninvasive hemoglobin measurement device. The researchers also evaluate and discuss the effect of using different kinds of lighting sources.
