General Health Check – The science.
Clinically validated vital signs monitoring on your smartphone.
The science behind Helfie's General Health Check.
Helfie’s General Health Check turns your smartphone into a contactless vital signs monitor to support self-monitoring and inform personal wellness decisions.
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.
The result is simple, clinically grounded screening using five key biomarkers: heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, and heart rate variability.
Why are vital signs so important?
Vital signs are foundational in clinical practice because small, sustained deviations often precede deterioration in a person’s health.
Non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and chronic respiratory illness account for 75% of non-pandemic-related deaths globally. Many of these conditions progress silently. Continuous, accurate, and accessible monitoring enables earlier intervention, risk stratification, and reduced downstream costs, particularly for people without regular access to care.
How does a smartphone camera measure vital signs?
Traditional photoplethysmography (PPG) measures changes in blood volume optically through contact sensors, like you find on wearables.
Helfie uses rPPG, which extracts the signal from standard RGB video, eliminating the need for specialised hardware. The process 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.
Independently evaluated against clinical reference devices.
Helfie’s vital signs technology has been evaluated across multiple hospital sites against established medical devices, with results showing strong agreement across key measurements.
Performance has also been assessed across varied skin tones, with consistent accuracy supporting equitable use.
Across the studies, reported mean errors include:
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