Illustrative interface. Values shown are simulated.
VitalVein is an intelligent wellness companion designed to help you observe and understand your body's everyday heart and pulse signals through real-time waveform visualisation and personalised session tracking. It turns live sensor data from your wrist and fingertip into intuitive visuals, trends, and recorded sessions — so you can better understand your daily wellness patterns.
VitalVein is a smartphone-based cardiovascular screening tool. It uses the camera and accelerometer already in the phone to estimate heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, blood pressure, and haemoglobin — putting a quick vitals check in the hands of any clinic worker, community health volunteer, or patient in a rural area, without a $40 pulse oximeter or a $100 digital cuff.
Cardiovascular disease is the world's leading cause of death, and most of those deaths fall on the places least equipped to catch the warning signs early. When the screening equipment isn't there, the check simply doesn't happen.
VitalVein exists to close that gap — turning a phone people already own into a basic vitals check, so cost, distance, and a missing device stop being the reason a problem goes unseen. That is the whole point of the project.
Read the full missionFigures: World Health Organization.
VitalVein works through three complementary signal types. Each can stand alone — together they unlock measurements no single one can produce.
The user rests a fingertip over the rear camera and flash for about sixty seconds. The app reads the minute colour changes in the skin as blood pulses through the capillary bed beneath it.
Hold the front camera up to your face and the app extracts the same pulsatile signal from facial video — contact-free. The approach builds on Google Research's work on passive heart monitoring from ordinary video.
Lay the phone flat on your chest and the accelerometer captures the mechanical motion of each heartbeat — a seismocardiogram. Pairing it with PPG gives pulse transit time, which correlates with arterial stiffness and blood pressure.
VitalVein performs all signal processing locally on your device. Frames from the camera are converted to a waveform and discarded in the same pass — they are never written to disk and never uploaded. Your personal wellness data stays secure and remains accessible even without an internet connection.
That is not only a privacy decision. A community health worker in a village with no reliable signal needs the same reading as a nurse in a city clinic. Anything that depends on a round trip to a server is a tool that stops working exactly where it is needed most.
How we handle your dataA single number tells you little. VitalVein keeps every session so the shape of your ordinary days becomes visible.
Watch the trace build as it is captured, with a live signal-quality indicator so you know when a reading is worth keeping.
Every capture is recorded with its waveform, timestamp, and quality score — reviewable side by side, exportable when you want it.
Resting pulse by week, HRV against sleep and stress, drift you would never notice from one reading alone.
On-screen coaching for finger placement, framing, and stillness — the difference between a clean trace and a wasted minute.
No account, no signal, no problem. Every feature works in airplane mode, in a clinic basement, or on a field visit.
Produce a clean summary of a session or a date range to hand to a clinician — you choose what is shared, and when.
Screen dozens of people on a single field visit using the phone already in your pocket — no kit to carry, calibrate, or replace.
A fast triage check when the oximeter is in use, the cuff has walked off, or a second opinion on a borderline reading would help.
Understand your resting pulse, recovery, and daily patterns without buying a wearable — and keep the record entirely to yourself.
VitalVein is a wellness and screening tool, not a medical device. It is not cleared or approved by any regulator, and its estimates are not a diagnosis. Never use it to make a treatment decision, and never delay seeking care because of a reading it produced. If something feels wrong, contact a qualified clinician.
Heart rate from finger PPG is the most robust of the five and tracks conventional oximetry closely under good conditions. SpO2, blood pressure, and haemoglobin are harder problems: they depend on calibration, skin tone, ambient light, and how still the user stays. We report a confidence score with every estimate rather than presenting a bare number, and we are explicit that these are estimates for screening — a flag to seek a proper measurement, never a replacement for one.
No. Capture, processing, estimation, and history all run on the handset. You can use VitalVein in airplane mode indefinitely. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no server waiting for your data.
Any reasonably modern smartphone with a rear camera, a flash, and an accelerometer. Finger PPG and SCG are undemanding; rPPG from facial video benefits from a newer device because it processes more frames per second. Target hardware is the mid-range Android phones already common in the communities VitalVein is built for.
No — the seismocardiogram is optional. Skip it and you still get heart rate, HRV, SpO2, and haemoglobin estimates from PPG alone. It is needed only for pulse transit time, which is what the blood pressure estimate is derived from.
Yes. Sessions export as CSV, including the raw waveform samples, so you can take your history with you, hand it to a clinician, or analyse it yourself. Deleting a session deletes it from the device — there is no other copy.
That belief is the whole project — making a basic vitals check something anyone can reach, on the phone already in their pocket.