This tech (detecting pulse from regular video) has been around almost 20 years now, and this doesn't seemed to have happened yet.

You see this type of thing in spy movies, but I'm not sure it's that useful in real life. You're basically taking one piece of data a polygraph uses, but without the most important component (skin conductance). Polygraph accuracy isn't that great to begin with. You can profile and manipulate people more effectively based on their reactions and behaviour, and their pulse will be much harder to interpret.

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ranger_danger 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think this tech has actually been used in practice for that long, if at all. It was only first demonstrated in 2012 at SIGGRAPH.

Can you cite any commercially available uses of such tech?

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nearbuy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know any commercial uses of such tech today. I'm not saying they don't exist. I just don't know of them.

I had said I don't think it's very useful for "manipulating and profiling people over video chat", so I wouldn't really expect there to be a commercial product for that. Probably it's used in fitness or heart rate monitoring apps for people that don't have a fitness tracker device and prefer not to manually count their pulse.

Here is the tech demonstrated in 2007: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17074525/

The core algorithm is really simple. You find a patch of skin. Take the average color of the pixels in that patch. The color will become more reddish each pulse. Do an FFT and take the strongest peak in the plausible heart rate range. You could prototype this in a few hundred lines of python.

If this were useful for police or hiring managers, someone could have use the tech to make an app for them within the past 19 years.

Of course, companies have a history of trying to market a lot of BS metrics (e.g. graphology, MBTI) to hiring managers, so I wouldn't be that surprised to see a company claim they can predict employee success using pulse. Whether it works is another story.

	▲	ddalex 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You could prototype this in a few hundred lines of python. You mean Claude can one-shot this.

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swiftcoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't it's ever been practical to ship in a product? You need ~20 seconds of data to stabilise the reading, and any large motion ruins it - even though Microsoft Research demonstrated a Kinect could detect heartrate in a lab setting, it wasn't viable to ship in a fitness game.

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numpad0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

(2008)

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2717852/