Clinically validated vital signs monitoring on any smartphone

Using remote photoplethysmography, or rPPG, the camera captures subtle colour changes in facial skin that reflect blood flow. Advanced signal processing converts this into a clean waveform from which key vital signs are derived within seconds and at minimal cost. 

The result is consumer-simple, clinically grounded screening for five high-value biomarkers: heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and heart rate variability. 

Non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and chronic respiratory illness account for over 70 percent of global deaths and trillions of dollars in costs. Many of these conditions progress silently¹. Continuous, accurate and accessible monitoring enables earlier intervention, risk stratification and reduced downstream costs, particularly for people without regular access to care.

PPG measures changes in blood volume optically. Traditional PPG requires contact sensors, as found in wearables. Helfie uses rPPG, which extracts the signal from standard RGB video, eliminating the need for specialised hardware. The pipeline identifies facial regions of interest, aggregates pixel-level colour signals and applies the POS algorithm to combine red, green and blue channels into a single pulse signal. Convolutional filtering and heartbeat pattern matching suppress noise from motion, lighting and device variability, producing a reliable physiological waveform. 

Helfie continuously improves accuracy through adaptive correction methods tuned for real-world conditions, including low-end hardware and suboptimal lighting, expanding usability across diverse users and environments.