Are you burning fat?

Abstract

Obesity is the major contributor of several diseases and results in higher healthcare cost to our society. Diet and exercise can improve fitness level and hence better health. But, people need an easy way of knowing if they are in their fat-burning zone during exercise. In addition, the measuring device needs to be non-invasive and ubiquitous. In this project we devised a technique of detecting the right heart zone and we believe this can be achieved at no-cost by using the "always-available" mobile phone. We used the camera and flash in NexusOne mobile phone for capturing the color intensity of finger pulse during heartbeats. In addition, we are able to extract the respiratory pattern from the heartbeats. From this, we are trying to find the anaerobic threshold of person using the variation in Inhalation and Exhalation during exercise. With this we will be able to find the heart rate zone at which a person stops burning his fat and starts burning his carbohydrates. To our knowledge there is no research reported on the analysis of burning fat based on the measurements from a mobile device. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.