Hey, how's it going, Dave 2D here,
So when Samsung announced the S9 and the S9 Plus, one of the things that they
talked about really briefly in their keynote was the inclusion of a new heart sensor,
and that one was really interesting to me because it was the first heart sensor;
It was the first phone that could supposedly measure blood pressure
with just a touch, which is pretty impressive.
Now I mentioned this briefly before in another video and people are like "who cares?",
"you know Samsung phones have had heart sensors forever!"
This is new. The old ones could measure heart rate, which is basically how fast your heart beats in a minute
which is cool, but this measures blood pressure,
which is the, I guess the amount of pressure that your blood exerts on your, the walls of your blood vessels?
It's-it's a very complex thing to measure, like you can't just measure it
Traditionally you need equipment to do it, you need a cuff that inflates
And then you need a stethoscope to hear what's going on inside there.
They have equipment to like speed it up
But it's not a one-touch process. The other reason why I find it interesting is that.
Okay, it's actually the more important reason is that blood pressure is
One of the leading risk factors when it comes to cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular disease
is the number one leading cause of death,
Globally, it's literally like the number one thing
that kills people in the world, cardiovascular disease.
And if you have a device, like a phone, that you can hold in your hand that can measure blood pressure;
Like that that could change the world, that could literally save lives
So I wanted to see what this thing could do. I wanted to see if this thing was accurate,
I wanted to see if the sensor worked like I thought it would work, and yeah, there's some good things,
there's some bad things, but we're just gonna going to go through real quickly. So to make this whole thing work
You need to get an app it's specific to the S9 and the S9 Plus. It doesn't work on other phones,
it's called My BP Lab and it's made in conjunction with Samsung;
It's through some university, and it's the only app that currently uses the blood pressure sensor.
Now this may change in the future
But as of today, in the middle of March
That's the only way they can use this blood pressure sensor on the S9 and the S9 plus
Okay, so when you set this thing up, the first thing you'll notice is that this is a
research study and the data that this app measures and collects is used to kind of
see the relationship between stress and health
It's an interesting study, but I mean I'm here just for the blood pressure measurement
That's all I really care about. Okay, so you have to sign a whole bunch of consent things,
but it's pretty easy to get it up and running
Now the first time you use this, it asks you to do a base measurement for your blood pressure
and that's where things get a little bit weird, the app doesn't tell you an
actual number like you don't know your blood pressure value.
You just know that that's your base measurement and any subsequent measurement that you do with the app it just tells you if it's gone
Up or down as a percentage it never actually gives you a number
Now there is a way to get a number into the system you have to calibrate it using external hardware
So you need a blood pressure cuff or a blood pressure
machine of some sort or you can go to your physician and get it done
But you can in put an actual known
measurement for your base blood pressure so that the app knows what that base value is
So every time you remeasure it if it goes up or down
It'll kind of just calculate what the difference is and just give you the new updated value
So the app doesn't actually measure blood pressure
It just kind of measures the change in blood pressure
So if you have like a base value that the app knows it can give you a number
but if you don't you don't have an actual measurement
So the sensor uses ppg to try to measure the blood pressure
it's basically an optical measurement
The sensor has a couple of LEDs and it measures the way that the light reflects off of your fingertip when it's covering the sensor to
Obtain a value so I calibrated this thing to my blood pressure
but when I use the app on my family members and friends
some of them who I know have
drastically different blood pressures from me the app and the sensor just weren't picking up proper differences now it is possible or even very likely
that the app kind of caters to the user like because it's calibrated to me it wouldn't work on other people
I think that's very likely
but I did test this thing out in a different way so what I did was I just
exercise and exercis does elevate blood pressure a bit and the app does pick up that increase in blood pressure
but it doesn't seem to be as accurate as a blood pressure cuff now
It could be a new limitation with the actual sensor like maybe it's not designed to measure
elevated blood pressure from exercise because that's like not how you want to measure blood pressure normally
but I mean that's just that's the only way that I can really test or
pretend to test its accuracy
Now there are other limitations one I noticed that cold fingers don't work very well
Dry fingers as well like I have can some dry hands from the winter and just like it doesn't always work reliably and the app
itself mentions that certain skin pigmentation may not work
But I think the big limitation comes from the sensor itself or at least the algorithm that the sensor is using to calculate blood pressure
So I think it's weird that it doesn't measure blood pressure
But it did a little research on this whole technology and that seems to be an issue with the tech look
There's a feasibility study on this stuff, and they're saying that you could measure the relative variation of blood pressure
but they couldn't find the absolute pressure value like I'm not even comfortable saying that this thing can measure blood pressure it can measure the
change in blood pressure, but it can't actually measure your blood pressure at least not with the current iteration of this app now
I think this app and this hardware and this whole thing can get way better
and I think that may be why
Samsung is doing this partnership with University like maybe
they're gonna be taking the data from like all the people that have been using this app and
using it to improve the sensor or the algorithm that is used in this
sensor and like that could just make it better over time
but right now the app and the sensor feel kind of mediocre to me
So the idea of a phone that you could use to check your blood pressure intermittently is awesome
and I think for some very very rare cases
It could technically save a life even in its current
Iteration like if you were someone that didn't know anything about your blood pressure
and you started using this thing and you notice that it was elevated
You could kind of do something to monitor or manage that that's cool
but for the vast majority of people that are interested in this phone like I would not consider the blood pressure monitor a
substantial feature at least not enough to warrant the purchase of this phone because of that feature okay
Hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you liked it. Subs if you loved it. See you guys next time