You have probably used that nifty Android an iPhone app that measures your heart rate — but according to some researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the UK, the camera on your smartphone can act as a full-blown diagnostic tool. Using a Motorola Droid phone, a team led by professor Ki Chon can measure your heart rate and rhythm, respiration rate, and blood oxygen saturation — all by looking at the color of your finger when held up against the camera.

By placing your finger over the camera, light has to pass through your blood to reach the sensor. This new app measures how the light reflects off your pulsing stream of plasma, and correlates the shift in color to derive your heart rate and rhythm, and how much oxygen is in your blood. Technically it operates in a very similar way to Instant Heart Rate, the Android app that simply measures your pulse, but in this case the team obviously has enough expert knowledge to pull more information from the data.

As for whether this app can actually be used for medical diagnostics, rather shockingly the app is just as accurate as conventional measurements from ECGs, respiration belts, and blood oximeters. The team tested the output from the app against these medical instruments and the results were found to be the same. Furthermore, since the app can also measure heart rhythm, the research team are currently adding functional to detect atrial fibrillation, the most common form of cardiac arrhythmia.

Tantalizingly, Chon’s team is working on a version that will work with tablets, and presumably the Droid app could be calibrated to work on almost any Android phone — but unfortunately the app isn’t available to download, and a patent has been filed to protect the invention… so who knows when this potentially life-saving app will actually be made available to the public, and at what cost.

Read more at Worcester Polytechnic Institute