A portable system for real-time non-contact blood oxygen saturation measurements

Abstract

A portable low cost system for blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) measurement is developed in this paper. It uses the principles of polarization based optical sectioning of the light reflecting from bodyparts to measure the oxygen saturation. In contrast to the existing devices like oximeter, the proposed system does not require any body contact for the measurements. The proposed system is designed using commercial webcams and well known mini computer device, Raspberry-pi. A linear relationship between the SpO2 and ratio of the partially polarized and polarized light components is observed. The observed results of the SpO2 measurements are consistent with the reference.