Heart rate monitoring using Kinect and color amplification

The color part of a color and motion amplification algorithm developed by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSail) research group [1] is converted to real-time and used to visualize and monitor heart rate for drivers in order to sense when a driver becomes sleepy. A Kinect camera mounted on the dashboard is used to gather video data from which the driver´s heart rate is extracted in real time. This technology can be used to unobtrusively monitor heart rate and breathing of infants, sleep apnea patients or other individuals where worn devices are not optimal.