Say cheese? Taking the selfie health checkup at Mobile World Congress
Selfies tend to only be good for sharing your face with the world via social media – but there might actually be a more useful application for them now.
Companies are developing 30-second selfie health checkups, which can be carried out with any front-facing smartphone camera.
The technology relies on a process called transdermal optical imaging, which detects facial blood flow patterns under the skin.
The solution developed by Canadian company Nuralogix can provide more than 30 readings just from the selfie scan.
That data gets sent to the cloud where it is compared against a machine learning algorithm, which has been trained on a database of more than 40,000 patients.
Those patients had their facial blood flow patterns measured, and the group consisted of people of all ages, health conditions, genders, and skin tones, the company said.
“We discovered that as your physiological state shifts, the human body shifts, you get stressed and the patterns change,” explained Lindsay Brennan, senior marketing specialist at Nuralogix.
“But they’re so tiny, they’re so imperceptible, you actually can’t see them with the human eye. But we discovered that the cameras on any device can actually pick up on these changes. So our technology actually works with any iPads, laptop, anything with a front-facing camera,” she told Euronews Next.
The technology is not a diagnostic-grade tool, but it can predict the risk level for different conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
“What we’re giving you is a risk profile,” said Brennan. “So we’re telling you, based on your results here, you might be more susceptible to stroke or heart disease for example. So companies that actually integrate our technology, sometimes they’ll build out a recommendation system”.
Taking the selfie scan
Euronews Next put the tech to the test at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and thankfully our reporter’s results didn’t give him any immediate cause for concern.
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