[Cyborg] medical mirror

[Eric Boyd]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyWnvAWEbWE&feature=player_embedded

Basically, using nothing other than a webcam (1.3MP, 15 Hz!), they can 
read your heart rate.  Then they built that into a "medical mirror", so 
you can see your heart beat in the morning when you brush your teeth :-)

I found one of his papers about it online, full text:

Non-contact, automated cardiac pulse measurements using video imaging 
and blind source separation
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=oe-18-10-10762

Looks to me like the big breakthrough here is the motion independence, 
which they got through a combination of face recognition and cropping 
and separating the video into it's three component colors.  They claim 
an average error from the reference pulseox reading of less than 1 BPM 
even with movement, that's pretty impressive.

Anyone want to write a laptop app which would just keep the webcam on 
all the time and log your heartbeat?

Eric