Using a smartphone, you can determine the level of oxygen saturation in the blood and reduce it up to 70%. This conclusion was made by scientists from the University of California at San Diego.
During the coronavirus pandemic, the demand for pulse oximeters has skyrocketed. Sometimes a person who has been diagnosed with coronavirus does not have severe symptoms and continues treatment at home. But if the pulse oximeter shows that the level of saturation or oxygen saturation of the blood falls below 95%, this is an occasion for an urgent call for an ambulance, since this threatens with the most severe pulmonary complications. Therefore, all citizens were encouraged to purchase these simple devices worn on the finger, and in Moscow they were also distributed free of charge in kits for pensioners who had been vaccinated.
A secure smartphone will be introduced in February
In a pilot study by scientists from California, it was shown that smartphones have the ability to determine the level of oxygen saturation in the blood up to 70%. This is the lowest value that pulse oximeters can record. You need to put your finger on the camera and smartphone flash, which use a deep learning algorithm in diagnostics, deciphering oxygen readings. While these applications are not yet freely available, they will appear in the future.
Expert: pulse oximeter is not needed at home
When the researchers injected participants with a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen to artificially reduce blood oxygen levels, the smartphone detected this absolutely correctly 80% of the time. In a number of similar applications, volunteers were asked to hold their breath for long periods of time to artificially lower blood oxygen levels, which made them uncomfortable. However, the test, which used the same mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, did not require people not to breathe for a whole minute, and made it possible to more effectively evaluate the effectiveness of such pulse oximeters. (READ MORE) 
UC San Diego
Medicine
public scientific is a research university located in La Jolla, San Diego in the state of California, USA, one of the ten campuses of the University of California