Pretty soon you will not need a smartwatch to measure your heart rate or breathing. Google declared a month ago that an update was coming to Pixel phones that would permit clients to quantify their respiration and heart rate through the cameras.

We definitely realized that this would be a coordinated exclusive to Pixel phones, with the feature showing up on other Android gadgets at an undefined later date, however, the word “supported” is still strangely ambiguous here.

Does that mean any Pixel gadget that can truly run the software, or any that is formally still supported by Google? On the off chance that the last mentioned, precludes the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, which arrived at the finish of their support period last October.

The feature will give Pixel clients an approach to check their heart rate and respiration, without requiring a wearable that continually measures their metrics. Estimating your pulse includes you setting a fingertip over the back camera, which at that point dissects subtle color changes in the skin to give a heartbeat reading. Google’s trying shows it to be exact to 2%, however clearly it’s intended for one-off testing, instead of giving steady updates the way the best smartwatches do.

Respiration tracking, in the interim, utilizes the front-facing camera. Place the phone before you with your head and torso in view, and in the wake of observing your chest movements, the application will calculate your breaths each minute. Google guarantees that in testing it’s demonstrated exact to within one breath each minute; nonetheless, the organization focuses on that neither it nor the heart-rate measurement is proposed for medical purposes.

Notwithstanding this, Google obviously feels very sure about the precision of its technology, which should give it the edge over the different applications that guarantee to do the same thing, with no real scrutiny.

“We developed both features — and completed initial clinical studies to validate them — so they work in a variety of real-world conditions and for as many people as possible,” Shwetak Patel, Google Health’s Director of Health Technologies wrote back in February. “For example, since our heart rate algorithm relies on approximating blood flow from color changes in someone’s fingertip, it has to account for factors such as lighting, skin tone, age and more in order to work for everyone.”