India’s leading digital health platform MFine announced a groundbreaking innovation by bringing Blood Pressure and Glucose monitoring on a smartphone. These will be added to MFine’s suite of self-check health tools available on its app, eliminating the need of any external devices to measure and track these health vitals.

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Launched three weeks ago in beta, the BP monitoring tool has already been used by more than 10,000 users and is clocking over thousands of readings everyday by users from across the country.

According to a press statement, these health monitoring features are built with MFine’s proprietary algorithm that measures blood pressure and glucose level by obtaining PPG signals from a user’s fingertip. A smartphone camera and flash are used to observe the changes in the red and blue wavelengths of the PPG signals and come up with a reading. The company claims its algorithm for measuring BP scores an accuracy “close to 90%”, reports MobiHealthNews.

At present, the new vital measurement features are available on the MFine app for select Android phones and will soon come to iOS devices.

“Advances in the areas of big data, artificial intelligence and mobile technology have opened new opportunities for monitoring health, detecting and preventing diseases using smartphones,” said Ajit Narayan, CTO of MFine. Mr. Narayan believes this would help make basic health assessments universal, easy and free to use for millions of people in India.

India is currently experiencing a massive increase in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and bears a higher burden than most nations, particularly in cardiovascular and chronic respiratory diseases, hypertension and diabetes. There are more than 200 million diagnosed hypertension patients in the country who have limited access to BP (blood pressure) measuring tools for use at home.

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Similarly, there are over 80 million diabetes patients and 200 million pre-diabetic people in India who primarily monitor their glucose levels by using invasive and time-consuming blood tests.