Pinterest for iPad Debuts, Cardiio Tells Heart Rate From Video

Pinterest may not be as popular as Facebook or even Twitter but it is one addictive community to be a part of. There are plenty of awesome content curators on the site who keep finding great visual content to share with their friends and followers. Being able to go through content and pin new ones on iPhone is nice. But Pinterest’s app for iPad will help you get even more out of this community.

Pinterest has released its new app for both the iPad and Android platform. The iPad version is designed to take full advantage of the larger screen to make pinning things easier.

We had to make our app really, really fast … We went to many great lengths to make this app as fast as your phone is capable of going.

Evan Sharp, a founder of Pinterest, was quoted as saying on NY Times. Pinterest for iPad has a familiar layout and makes keeping up with the latest pins comments, and likes easier. The app is not perfect but a good step by Pinterest.

Speaking of cool apps, Ming-Zher Poh, a PhD Student at MIT’s Media Lab, has developed an exciting application called Cardiio that uses the iPhone’s camera to produce an estimate of your heart rate. The app captures a video of the user’s face and analyzes it to determine an estimate BPM. You won’t need a separate hardware to get readings with this:

The measurement principles are the same as clinical pulse oximeters. Every time your heart beats, more blood rushes through the vessels in your face, causing them to expand. The increase in blood volume absorbs more light, resulting in a decrease in the amount of light reflected from your face. Using sophisticated software, your iPhone’s front camera can track these tiny variations in light that are invisible to the naked eye to calculate your heart rate.

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Studies seem to have shown that the measurements with this tool are within 3 bpm of a clinical pulse oximeter. You need to be in a well-lit area so your face is well illuminated. Cardiio was fairly accurate in our tests. It is truly remarkable and has a lot of potential.