Hangin’ with my new friends!
It’s been a bust first week in Paths-UP. First getting oriented into the program and determining our overall goal. Then working on obtaining the necessary programming skills to perform the upcoming work
At the start, we met our Mentor Yong who is now like a shepherd with 6 blind sheep.
We got to take a tour of the scalable health lab and see some of the research going on there. We then started reading some papers as a group. Suddenly we are trying to understand what a photoplesmogram (PPG) is and how to use them.
So, a PPG is a time based plot of the absorption of light at a certain place (in the case of our work – a region of the face). The concept is that when there is higher blood volume in that particular region, more light will by absorbed by the blood and the signal to our camera will decrease. We can track the changes in the intensity of light to generate the PPG. The PPG then can be interpreted to track things such as Pulse Rate and Pulse Rate Variability which are indicators of general health.
The value of PPG is it is non-contact way of collecting vital data. It can hopefully be used through simple web-cams and camera phones with no additional hard-ware at the test subjects site.
However, there are some major difficulties to overcome:
- Camera technology has difficulty recognizing in darker skin
- Changes in lighting during capture
- Motion of the subject
Currently we are working on the basics. We are trying to get the base facial recognition software up and running on our computers.
In order to prepare for the intense coding part of this project, I spent much of the week first reviewing the Python: Absolute Beginner course from EdX and then completing the certification thru the Python: Fundamentals course. I can now write simple code as seen below, but more importantly, can start to understand more complex code.
