I remember being fascinated by the Eulerian Video Magnification work when some of the videos were being spread around, so I was excited to see the Webcam Pulse Detector project pop up on Quantified Self as I was scrolling through some missed feeds this morning.
It didn’t seem too difficult to setup for somebody with some linux familiarity and I set off to make it happen on my laptop.
The entire process took a couple hours. Some of that was due to missteps in installing OpenCV or not using sudo in the right place. The rest was due to the unavoidable—some packages just take a long time to install.
Seeing it finally work is really, really cool. Using my forehead, the app seemed to consistently track my heart rate at around 54-57bpm. At the same time I measured my pulse at my wrist as 60bm. I’ll need to track the consistency over time and with non-resting heart rates as well, but that seems like an acceptable variance so far. Pretty cool stuff.
If you want to give it a go and you’re running OS X 10.8.3 on your machine, I’m embedding a gist with the commands I had to use to make this work along with some comments inline.
[gist id=5565120]
There were also plenty of resources that proved invaluable in actually finding the right answers for installing some of these software packages:
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