You can now monitor your heart-rate via your Xiaomi phone’s camera

• Xiaomi’s Mi Health app can now track your heart rate via your phone’s camera and flash.
• This means you don’t need a phone with a dedicated sensor to get heart-rate measurements.

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We’ve seen heart-rate tracking on smartphones before thanks to the likes of Samsung offering a dedicated sensor on older flagship phones. Now, Xiaomi shows that you don’t need specific hardware for this tech.

Xiaomi’s Mi Health app (not to be confused with Mi Fit) is now rolling out the ability to measure your heart rate via a smartphone’s camera and flash, XDA-Developers reports.

You’ll need to cover the phone’s camera and flash completely with your finger, with the flash being used to light up your finger and the camera actually getting a fix on your heart rate. Check out the screenshots below, courtesy of the outlet and MIUISystemUpdates Telegram group.

To try it out yourself, you’ll need to launch the Xiaomi Mi Health app (or download it first if you don’t have it), tap the “heart rate” section, and then the button in the bottom-right section. XDA reports that the feature is rolling out to version 2.7.4 of the app.

We haven’t seen this functionality hit our phones yet and a proper tracker is still better if you need constant measurements, but it could nevertheless be a cost-effective way to get results if it’s accurate. Our only real concern is that fingerprint smudges on the camera itself seem inevitable, so those looking to tracking their heart-rate via this method will need to clean the lens before taking snaps.

Next: Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra review — Big numbers, big value