Can Cardiio really monitor your heart rate using your phone’s camera?

Gadgets that monitor your pulse are increasingly popular at the moment, as people begin tracking their health and fitness levels more and more, because it shows how hard you’re working and could even flag up any underlying health problems.

However, the team at Cardiio have developed a new application that promises to give you “an accurate heart rate monitor” without even touching you. Yep, it sounds kind of impossible and a bit ridiculous, but the idea behind Cardiio is that the app will utilise your phone’s camera in order to analyse the amount of light reflected off your face and measure your pulse that way without the need for hooking it up to any other gadgets or gizmos.

According to the blurb on the app’s iTunes page, Cardiio is based on research from a lab at MIT, which has been exploring ways to measure your pulse based on how your face looks. An increase in blood volume apparently means there’s less light on your face and the app has been developed to sense these super subtle changes that you probably wouldn’t be able to spot with the naked eye.

Even some of the biggest app advocates might approach Cardiio with caution, after all how advanced is the iPhone’s camera at picking up on such minute changes? But first reviews suggest the app is just as accurate as much more advanced devices, but we’ll let you know as soon as we’ve had a play around with Cardiio ourselves.

You can download Cardiio for iOS devices from iTunes for free.