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00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here. So when Samsung announced the S9 and the S9 Plus,
00:10one of the things that they talked about really briefly in their keynote was the inclusion
00:13of a new heart sensor. And that was something that was really interesting to me because
00:16it was the first heart sensor. It was the first phone that could supposedly measure
00:20blood pressure with just a touch, which is pretty impressive. Now, I mentioned this briefly
00:25before in another video and people were like, who cares? You know, Samsung phones have had
00:28heart sensors forever. This is new. The old ones could measure heart rate, which is basically
00:33how fast your heart beats in a minute, which is cool. But this measures blood pressure,
00:37which is the, I guess, the amount of pressure that your blood exerts on the walls of your
00:43blood vessels. It's a very complex thing to measure. Like you can't just measure it. Traditionally,
00:48you need equipment to do it. You need a cuff that inflates and then you need a stethoscope
00:52to hear what's going on inside there. They have equipment to like speed it up, but it's
00:55not a one touch process. The other reason why I find it interesting is that, okay, it's
01:00actually the more important reason is that blood pressure is one of the leading risk
01:06factors when it comes to cardiovascular disease. And cardiovascular disease is the number one
01:11leading cause of death globally. It's literally like the number one thing that kills people
01:16in the world, cardiovascular disease. And if you have a device like a phone that you
01:20can hold in your hand that can measure blood pressure, like that, that could change the
01:26world. That could literally save lives. So I wanted to see what this thing could do.
01:29I wanted to see if this thing was accurate. I wanted to see if the sensor worked like
01:33I thought it would work. And yeah, there's some good things. There's some bad things,
01:36but we're just going to go through real quickly. So to make this whole thing work, you need
01:39to get an app. It's specific to the S9 and the S9 plastic. It doesn't work on other phones.
01:44It's called my BP lab and it's made in conjunction with Samsung. It's through some university
01:48and it's the only app that currently uses the blood pressure sensor. Now this may change
01:52in the future, but as of today, the middle of March, that's the only way they can use
01:56this blood pressure sensor on the S9 and the S9 plus. Okay. So when you set this thing
02:01up, the first thing you'll notice is that this is a research study and the data that
02:05this app measures and collects is used to kind of see the relationship between stress
02:10and health. It's an interesting study, but I mean, I'm here just for the blood pressure
02:14measurement. That's all I really care about. Okay. So you have to sign a whole bunch of
02:18consent things, but it's pretty easy to get it up and running. Now, the first time you
02:21use this, it asks you to do a base measurement for your blood pressure. And that's where
02:25things get a little bit weird. The app doesn't tell you an actual number. Like you don't
02:30know your blood pressure value. You just know that that's your base measurement and any
02:33subsequent measurement that you do with the app, it just tells you if it's gone up or
02:37down as a percentage. It never actually gives you a number. Now there is a way to get a
02:41number into the system. We have to calibrate it using external hardware. So you need a
02:44blood pressure cuff or a blood pressure machine of some sort, or you can go to your physician
02:48and get it done, but you can input an actual known measurement for your base blood pressure
02:52so that the app knows what that base value is. So every time you remeasure it, if it
02:57goes up or down, it'll kind of just calculate what the difference is and just give you the
03:00new updated value. So the app doesn't actually measure blood pressure. It just kind of measures
03:06the change in blood pressure. So if you have like a base value that the app knows it can
03:10give you a number, but if you don't, you don't have an actual measurement. So the sensor
03:15uses PPG to try to measure the blood pressure. It's basically an optical measurement. The
03:19sensor has a couple of LEDs and it measures the way that the light reflects off of your
03:23fingertip when it's covering the sensor to obtain a value. So I calibrated this thing
03:27to my blood pressure, but when I use the app on my family members and friends, some of
03:31them who I know have drastically different blood pressures from me, the app and the sensor
03:35just weren't picking up proper differences. Now it is possible or even very likely that
03:39the app kind of caters to the user like because it's calibrated to me, it wouldn't work on
03:44other people. I think that's very likely, but I did test this thing out in a different
03:48way. So what I did was I just exercise and exercise does elevate blood pressure a bit
03:52and the app does pick up that increase in blood pressure, but it doesn't seem to be
03:56as accurate as a blood pressure cuff. Now it could be a limitation with the actual sensor.
04:00Like maybe it's not designed to measure elevated blood pressure from exercise because that's
04:04like not how you want to measure blood pressure normally, but I mean that's just that's the
04:09only way that I can really test or pretend to test its accuracy. Now there are other
04:14limitations. One, I noticed that cold fingers don't work very well. Dry fingers as well.
04:19Like I have some dry hands from the winter and just like it doesn't always work reliably
04:23and the app itself mentions that certain skin pigmentation may not work, but I think the
04:28big limitation comes from the sensor itself or at least the algorithm that the sensor
04:32is using to calculate blood pressure. So I think it's weird that it doesn't measure
04:37blood pressure, but I did a little research on this whole technology and that seems to
04:40be an issue with the tech. Like there's a feasibility study on this stuff and they're
04:44saying that you could measure the relative variation of blood pressure, but they couldn't
04:48find the absolute pressure value. Like I'm not even comfortable saying that this thing
04:51can measure blood pressure. It can measure the change in blood pressure, but it can't
04:55actually measure your blood pressure, at least not with the current iteration of this app.
04:59Now I think this app and this hardware and this whole thing can get way better and I
05:03think that may be why Samsung is doing this partnership with the university. Like maybe
05:07they're going to be taking the data from like all the people that are going to be using
05:10this app and using it to improve the sensor or the algorithm that is used in this sensor
05:16and like that could just make it better over time. But right now the app and the sensor
05:20feel kind of mediocre to me. So the idea of a phone that you could use to check your blood
05:25pressure intermittently is awesome and I think for some very, very rare cases it could technically
05:30save a life, even in its current iteration. Like if you were someone that didn't know
05:33anything about your blood pressure and you started using this thing and you noticed that
05:36it was elevated, you could kind of do something to monitor or manage that. That's cool, but
05:40for the vast majority of people that are interested in this phone, like I would not consider the
05:45blood pressure monitor a substantial feature, at least not enough to warrant the purchase
05:50of this phone because of that feature. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if
05:54you liked it, subs if you loved it. See you guys next time.