Mobile Applications

Measuring blood oxygen levels promises to become a new trend among users of wearable electronics. In any case, more and more manufacturers are now equipping their smartwatches with a toolkit that determines saturation. As a result, not only expensive smartwatches, but also quite affordable fitness bracelets with only a built-in heart rate monitor among their medical equipment, have been able to learn how to take such measurements. So many have decided that since cheap trackers can measure oxygen levels, then expensive smartwatches will obviously be able to do it. Let’s find out if this is really the case.

Everyone has probably measured blood oxygen levels at least once. But you can’t do the same thing with your smartphone.

Oddly enough, the query “blood oxygen level smartphone” is very popular on Google. By simple reasoning, you can guess that users are looking for ways to measure saturation using just a smartphone. Yes, no modern flagship offers this functionality by default, although some devices have a built-in heart rate monitor and can measure heart rate. However, software developers saw this as a good opportunity to make money and introduced their own applications for measuring oxygen in the blood.

Applications for measuring oxygen in the blood

If you open up Google Play and type the phrases “blood oxygen”, “blood oxygen measurement” or “oximeter” into your search, you will see at least a few dozen apps offering saturation measurement. While there are some good-quality heart rate measurement apps among them, most of them are cheating utilities. And, judging by the rating, users quickly realize that they are trying to cheat by giving them fake numbers, so they give them minimal ratings.

Android users are deceived in different ways. For example, recently they tried to slip them a blood pressure measurement app.

How do I know it’s cheating? Well, you don’t really have to be a smart aleck. It’s enough to have a rough understanding of how pulse oximeters work. They’re devices for measuring saturation. They look like small clips with an emitter and a small screen on the surface, which shows the result of the measurement. Their principle is based on the ability of hemoglobin (a protein that carries oxygen) to absorb light differently depending on the degree of oxygen saturation.

How blood oxygen is measured

The color of the blood indicates the oxygen content of the blood.

A pulse oximeter emits two different wavelengths of light – 660 nm (red) and 940 nm (infrared) – that shine through the skin and thus determine the color of the blood. The darker it is, the more oxygen it contains, and the lighter it is, the less oxygen it contains. The necessary calculations are then made, and the user gets a result about the saturation level. So, essentially, you need a heart rate monitor and a photo detector for the measurement. And the software component, which is supposedly offered by the software from Google Play, is only needed to interpret the data.

Smartphones affect our health more than we thought.

What does all this mean? And that it’s impossible to measure blood oxygen levels with a smartphone without additional equipment. I concede that someone has thought to launch a special smartphone dongle like the one used to take EKG readings or blood pressure measurements. However, neither by default, nor by using apps from Google Play, which are false 100% of the time, you will not be able to take correct measurements, and the results you get will be taken from the ceiling.