Opportunistic Plethysmography using Video Cameras

A method for capturing high-quality cardiac plethysmography signals automatically and seamlessly, comprising:

• providing a personal electronic device containing a video camera embedded therein and a computer program running in the background that periodically takes a picture of the person using the device, runs at least one of a face detection and face recognition algorithm, and upon detection of a face, records a video, and then processes the video using algorithms which assess video quality by extracting video quality parameters;
• processing the recorded video further when the video quality parameters are above predefined thresholds, to generate a plethysmography signal indicative of cardiac activity;
• and
• optionally, processing the plethysmography signal to deduce cardiac activity, wherein the method maintains a pleasurable user experience with the personal electronic device.