One of the childhood fantasies we’ve all had as kids was to be a doctor with all our own cool stethoscopes hanging around our necks saving lives every day. Unfortunately, not many of us followed through with those dreams and are now dependent on the ones who did for our health welfare. The rapid increase in stressful lifestyles has also turned many of us to compromise on routine exercise and proper diets just to get more work done. This unbalanced lifestyle has led to a dangerous growth in health problems in both young and middle-aged population segments.

Awareness is the key, and embracing preventative healthcare is better than accepting curative healthcare. Here are two fantastic health apps for the Android platform that will double up as your virtual health supervisors by letting you track your body’s conditioning and stress levels anytime and anywhere. Not only that, they will also provide you with a great deal of knowledge about your inner self, which is something that may be imperative for an individual to know.

Instant Heart Rate

Yes, your Android smartphone can actually be turned into a stethoscope with the help of the Instant Heart Rate app. It displays your heart beats per minute with precise accuracy. So when you thought it is difficult to and non-pocket-friendly to go to the medical clinic to get your heart rate checked out, developers took that into consideration and created an app that lowers that cost.

So how does one go about this?

It’s simple and exactly like the original procedure. Switch on the Instant Heart Rate app and place your finger on the camera so that it covers the camera lens completely and remember not to press too hard or it may give up incorrect outputs.

Now click on the screen and wait for a few seconds and voila. It gives you the exact heart rate. You can also see your real time heart beat through the apps PPG graph.

The principle of working of this app is as follows:

Instant Heart Rate uses your phones built-in camera to track colour changes on the fingertip that are directly linked to your pulse. This is the same technique that medical pulse oximeters use.

The accuracy of this app has been verified by fitness coaches, doctors, nurses, EMTs and 5 million users like you.

Your resting heart rate gives you a view into your hearts fitness. The fitter you get the lower your heart rate will be.

So it’s that easy, you can test your fitness with just the mere existence of your smart phone.

Stress Check

Here’s another similar app that tracks the levels of stress using sensors which exist within your smart phone. It quantifies the level of physiological and psychological stress. It uses the same principle used in the above app i.e. using the camera and light within the phone to measure your heart rate.

This in turn gives Stress check an idea of the level of stress in your body.

How does it work?

Everyone experiences changes in heart rate before taking making a public appearance, running in a track race, or approaching a loved one etc. In fact,
not only does your heart rate increase, but the time variations between consecutive heart beats become more random and scattered too. By analyzing this factor of heart rate variability (HRV), Stress Check estimates your level of stress wherever you are, with no additional hardware.

It’s that easy.

To further analyse an individual’s HRV the user must use the app more often as this gives the device an idea of the functioning of the user’s body.

Algorithms used to analyse HRV follow recommendations of European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology (NASPE).

You can use this to check stress, reduce it which in turn reduce chances of chronic stress and subsequently observe progress.