Here’s a scary development for webcams, a MIT grad student has figured out how to determine if your heart is healthy just by looking at you via a webcam. The system uses an open-source face-tracking program and will study someone’s face, measuring the slight variations in brightness produced by the flow of blood through blood vessels in the face. So once the developer was able to determine how to account for variations in lighting and image quality, he was easily able to measure a pulse, and it worked well enough that it matched up with the results of FDA-approved devices. The hardware used is simple and cheap enough that it could be installed almost anywhere from a mirror in your home, or even using your own cell phone camera. The system could be improved in the future to even double up as a lie detector, figuring out if you’re nervous about stealing the cookies from the cookie jar every night. Video description after the jump.

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