Heart rate monitoring has been widely used in clinical care, fitness training and stress management. However, the longitudinal tracking of heart rate signals faces major challenges because of equipment availability and user motivation. In this talk, I will present a novel technique, LivePulse Games (LPG), to measure users' heart rate in real time by having them play casual games on unmodified mobile phones. With LPG, heart rate is calculated by detecting change in transparency of users' fingertips via a mobile device's built-in camera. LPG also integrate users' camera lens covering actions as a control mechanism for game play to detect heart rate implicitly. In this project, we explore the design space and trade-offs of LPG through three rounds of interactive design. In a 12-subject user study, we found that LivePulse games are fun to play and can measure heart rates accurately. We also report the insights for balancing measurement speed, accuracy and entertainment value.

Dr. Jingtao Wang is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and LRDC at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary research direction is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Jingtao's current research interests include - mobile interfaces, education/learning technology, social computing, machine learning and its applications in HCI, and end-user programming. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Before that, Jingtao was a researcher and team lead at the IBM China Research Lab, working on large-vocabulary, online handwriting recognition technologies for Asian languages. He received his master degree and bachelor degree both from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.