Researchers develop a new mobile tool that measures haemoglobin without drawing blood

Team Udayavani, May 23, 2020, 3:05 PM IST

Researchers claim to have developed a way to assess blood haemoglobin levels by using smartphone images of a person’s eyelids

This new tool of testing the haemoglobin is developed by the researchers of the University of Indianapolis, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in the US and Moi University School of Medicine in Kenya.

Young Kim from Purdue University in the US said, “Our new mobile health approach paves the way for bedside or remote testing of blood haemoglobin levels for detecting anemia, acute kidney injury and haemorrhages, or for assessing blood disorders such as sickle cell anemia.”

The research team used software to transform the built-in camera of a smartphone into a hyperspectral imager that reliably measures haemoglobin levels without the need for any hardware modifications or accessories.

Inner eyelid is considered as the most sensitive site as microvasculature is easily visible there, it can easily provide you with the haemoglobin level. After clicking the picture of the eye, the software in the smartphone applies spectral super-resolution algorithm to extract the information from the image and then another computational algorithm quantifies the blood haemoglobin level.

Clinical test with volunteers showed that prediction errors for the smartphone technique were within five to 10 per cent of those measured with clinical laboratory blood.