Show HN: A weird thing that detects your pulse from the browser video
pulsefeedback.io
pulsefeedback.io
The response I anticipate will be "But this will help doctors over telehealth and stuff!" - Please see https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
You see this type of thing in spy movies, but I'm not sure it's that useful in real life. You're basically taking one piece of data a polygraph uses, but without the most important component (skin conductance). Polygraph accuracy isn't that great to begin with. You can profile and manipulate people more effectively based on their reactions and behaviour, and their pulse will be much harder to interpret.
Can you cite any commercially available uses of such tech?
I had said I don't think it's very useful for "manipulating and profiling people over video chat", so I wouldn't really expect there to be a commercial product for that. Probably it's used in fitness or heart rate monitoring apps for people that don't have a fitness tracker device and prefer not to manually count their pulse.
Here is the tech demonstrated in 2007: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17074525/
The core algorithm is really simple. You find a patch of skin. Take the average color of the pixels in that patch. The color will become more reddish each pulse. Do an FFT and take the strongest peak in the plausible heart rate range. You could prototype this in a few hundred lines of python.
If this were useful for police or hiring managers, someone could have use the tech to make an app for them within the past 19 years.
Of course, companies have a history of trying to market a lot of BS metrics (e.g. graphology, MBTI) to hiring managers, so I wouldn't be that surprised to see a company claim they can predict employee success using pulse. Whether it works is another story.
You mean Claude can one-shot this.
It's also not a specific enough signal for the types of health conditions that require taking time off work. Assuming they could get an accurate resting heart rate, most of the time it'll just indicate whether the candidate does a lot of exercise.
1. `/api/event` endpoint mentioned in the `/stats/script.js` file;
2. There's `/parties/lobby/main/telemetry` in a minified JavaScript chunk asset;
3. There's VitalLens mentioned, and there's an error string in the same asset: "A valid API key or proxy URL is required to use VitalLens. If you signed up recently, please try again in a minute to allow your API key to become active. Otherwise, head to https://www.rouast.com/api to get a free API key."
He even shows pulse detection (around 8:30).
At one point I added the same EVM based heart rate detection but that requires sitting very still. I use it on my phone mainly therefore the common finger method is easiest one to use.
macOS 15.7.1 (24G231) Brave 1.87.186 (Official Build) (arm64) Chromium: 145.0.7632.45
``` try { const l=await navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({audio:!1,video:{facingMode:"user"}}); /* ... */ } catch { this.showError("Could not access webcam. Please check permissions.") } ```
There are alternatives to verify mediaDevices support as https://addpipe.com/getusermedia-examples/
It's super cool. Thanks for sharing. I want to build a biofeedback app for meditation and this looks like a good platform to use.
It's still vague beyond saying they trained an AI: "VitalLens is trained on the PROSIT and Vital Videos Africa dataset...The time-synchronized sensor array used for PROSIT consists of a video camera, electrocardiogram (ECG), pulse oximetry, blood pressure monitor, and an ambient light sensor. "