India’s Digital Health startup MFine has launched a Heart Rate Monitoring (HR) Tool on its app which enables users to keep track of their heart rate without needing an additional device or any other app. Thousands of users have already used the tool and currently more than 700 people use the tool to monitor their heart rate every day on MFine. Moving beyond telemedicine consultations and healthcare services, the company is working on various next-gen AI technologies which convert the mobile phone into rich diagnostics and vitals monitoring tool. MFine is planning to launch glucose monitoring and blood pressure measurement via its app by the end of 2022.

 MFine has built a proprietary algorithm that measures the heart rate using the smartphone camera. The Heart Rate is measured by the photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal from the user’s fingertip which is obtained by detecting changes in blood volume below the skin's surface. The PPG is an optically obtained plethysmogram that can be used to detect blood volume changes in the microvascular bed of tissue. Every time the heart beats, the amount of blood that reaches the capillaries in the fingers swells and then recedes. Because blood absorbs light, the MFine app is able to capture this ebb and flow using the flash of the phone's camera.

Ajit Narayanan, CTO, MFine, “the combination of medical diagnostics with smartphones will greatly advance the assessment, diagnosis and treatment of critical health issues. By enabling vitals monitoring through smartphones, MFine is making assessments universal and free to access for millions of people in India who otherwise would have found this hard to do. Along with artificial intelligence, the overall health data can play an incredible role in estimation and early diagnosis of diseases. We are excited at MFine to lead this major transformation and contribute to the use of smartphones as a diagnostics tool.”