Friday, March 1, 2013

Turning a Video Camera into a Stethoscope

This is the coolest thing I've seen all week (and justifies a third post of the day). Here a simple computer program magnifies motions and hue changes in video so that we can see the blood flow (pulse) and breathing movements in patterns that could even be diagnostic, without touching the patient at all:



The best part? The code is open and the idea is simple, so I too cannot wait to see what people across the world do with this. It's like a Neal Stephenson novel in real life ...

Could this be used to identify overly stressed people by video? At TSA checkpoints? Is that an invasion of privacy? In court? Let's not get ahead of ourselves, but I do think this has a lot of potential.

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