Your phone can use tiny skin-colour changes to measure your heart rate

Your phone can use tiny skin-colour changes to measure your heart rate

From Nature Podcast by Springer Nature Limited

June 3, 2026 · 18 min

About this episode

This episode discusses how smartphones can measure heart rates using camera technology and explores related scientific research.

In this episode: 00:57 How your smartphone’s camera could measure your heart rate Research article: Liao et al. 08:55 Research Highlights Nature: A star gone rogue tears through the Galaxy Nature: Gold keeps glittering courtesy of surface chemistry 11:04 Should you try something new in a restaurant? Maths has the answer Nature: Feynman solved the ‘restaurant dilemma’ 50 years ago — now a study confirms his mathematics Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Topics covered

  • smartphone technology
  • heart rate measurement
  • mathematics
  • restaurant decision making
  • science news

Keywords

  • heart rate
  • smartphone camera
  • mathematics
  • restaurant dilemma
  • science news

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Springer Nature Limited

Books & works: Liao et al., Nature, Feynman

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